Random bits of my so-called life.

Ohio gets kind of a bad rap. I did a college trip in Ohio with a beach urchin and a couple of her friends and their parents. I had a good time but ultimately it might’ve been better for me not to be there because I was nervous about it all for unknown reasons. My kiddo ultimately went to Kalamazoo College here in Michigan and ROCKED IT, as she has been rocking life ever since. I do remember how much fun I had driving my brand-new Dogha on that trip throughout the hills and valleys of eastern Ohio. (The Dogha was a 2001 top dollar Honda Accord with a V6 engine with about as much vroom as I am interested in.)

We’re over on the western side of Ohio this weekend and it is beautiful but it’s FLAT and I haven’t figgered out how to photograph it. So here is the interior of our room in our Victorian style Air B&B.

If you ever find yourself wanting to go to Delphos, Ohio, this is a GREAT place to stay and it is NOT expensive, at least not right now (it’s prob’ly less than the average Days Inn 🐽). The owner opened it in April 2020, yes really. We got gasoline yesterday morning and another person getting gas had seen us get into our cars outside the B&B and approached the GG to say that he had worked on the renovation of our home away from home and also owned a similar place. There are a number of these “mansions” here in Delphos and I walked around the area looking at some of them today. With turrets and cupolas they remind me of some areas of Sault Ste. Siberia although those areas have largely fallen into disrepair starting well before I was born.

Going on 10 years ago, The Commander was unhappily (albeit temporarily) residing at the long term care facility connected to War Memorial Hoosegow in Sault Ste. Siberia and we were figuring out what was NEXT. A social worker was visiting and it was a little crazy because I was telecommuting and the LSCHP (who almost NEVER called me) CALLED ME in the middle of it all so there was his big booming voice that you can hear even if you’re not on speaker.

The social worker was talking to mom about her life and was quite fascinated by mom’s stories of the travels she and my pilot dad took out in the American southwest during WWII. I will tell one of those stories here. When they decided to get married, mom had a plane reservation to get out there but got bumped in favor of a service person. So she took a train. When she reached her destination, she got dumped off the train in the middle of the night. It was pitch black and the station was locked up. And then… Dun dun dun… A MAN loomed in the darkness. Who was it? It was my dad! They were 22 and 24 when they married.

At one point the social worker said something about talking to mom in 10 years (conversationally, not officially). Mom replied with some horror that she wouldn’t be around in 10 years. I kind of rolled my eyes at that but it turned out she did only last most of another year. We moved her to assisted living and although I hoped she would be happy there, she never really got over losing her independence.

Today is the 100th anniversary of The Commander’s birth. Here she is in “god’s country” aka the yooperland threatening me with her cudgel for who knows what. Some snarky remark probably. Even though I know her birthdate, I was distracted this morning by trying to pay my car insurance. It’s due on my mom’s birthday and even though I’ve been paying it online for YEARS, I couldn’t manage to do it that way today (infinite loop anyone?) so I had to call. A beach urchin did remember her grandma’s birthday and a text from her reminded me 🧡

P.S. Last but not least, today is also the birthday of the “better half” of our friends of porterization. HB DP 🧡 Wish we were at Weber’s or The Earle or Real Seafood tonight 🐽

That was the GG’s phone beginning I dunno when, about 6AM or so? He was dead to the world and didn’t react to any of them. Probably just news alerts or dog whistles or whatever. I got up late (after 7) because I’m in an unfamiliar city and so didn’t want to do an 0-skunk-30. I know the Landfill neighborhood like the back of my hand.

Anyway, I got up and managed to navigate our gorgeous claw-foot tub. I don’t think I’ve had anything to do with a claw-foot tub since I was a little kid and my friend Helen’s family had one. Theirs was not fancy and had no shower. This one is all tarted up with a fancy shower. Still, using a *different* shower setup is a learning curve and I figger by about the last morning we’re here, I’ll be a pro.

Okay, then the GG went out to grab McDonald’s for breakfast. We could cook here but it’s a shared kitchen (although there’s nobody else here) and schlepping a whole bunch of food seemed overwhelming to me. So I got a hash brown and coffee and supplemented that with one of the clementines I did schlep. Plum Market Carolina Chicken salad for lunch, kept cold in the refrigerator aka Mooon Yooonit.

Problem… The GG: I can’t find my phone? I called it. No answer. I called it again. No answer. Now. I KNEW that it was ringing SOMEWHERE. What the heck, it made noise all night. Where was it? He went down to Mooon Yooonit and I called again. And again. And again. Five times. Finally I went downstairs and outside onto the porch and YELLED, “DID YOU FIND IT?.” He THOUGHT he could hear it. I called it one more time and he finally found it. UNDERNEATH SOME PAPERS!!! All you did was drive a couple blocks to McDonald’s and back. Why didn’t you just put it in your pocket or maybe the cupholder between the seats? Who knows.

He and MC road-hiked umpteen bazillion miles. I earned my pay big time, doing my part on a hot prodject we decided (overnight) we needed “yesterday”. I got kudos from my boss and even a bit of, well, not exactly kudos because he doesn’t really do that kind of thing but positive feedback from Mr. Bear. The GG said something like, “So now your ego is all inflated.” Not really. My boss is always supportive but Mr. Bear specializes in knocking down egos so any pride surely comes before a fall. We love him ANYWAY 🐽

A couple days before xmas we did a roundabout to drop off a few xmas packages (and some beer). As we were starting out, the GG said, “You haven’t been on an excursion in months.” My QUICK retort was, “I went to Indiana!” And I DID go to Indiana, with him, in November, to buy Everclear at Gay’s.

The GG thinks I don’t get oot and aboot enough despite the four(?) times I traveled to the yooperland during the “season”. I am not holing up in my house because I am depressed. I am trying to survive a pandemic. I am comfortable in my own home where I can easily get curbside pickup and delivery of any number of items. I can work and there’s all kinds of activity out my front window all the time. Walkers, runners, dogs, birds, delivery trucks, gas meter guys, you name it. When I am in the yooperland I am also home, in my childhood home, where I can interact with that community at a safe distance. And work…

Anyway, the GG convinced me to accompany him to an air B&B in Oh-haaa-o for a long weekend (it’s a long boring story) and after much trepidation, here I am.

I don’t like to take vacay at this time of year so I am working all day tomorrow and I did two meetings in the car on the way down, always such fun. We are kind of in the middle of nowhere (which is fine) but can I just say the back roads down here are a LOT different than they are in the Great Lake State. In the GLS, you can usually navigate the back roads to get from one place to another simply by making right angle turns, say south and east and south and east and south and east. Down here in Oh-haaa-o we seemed to be wildly wheeling and looping around every which way, every turn an acute or obtuse angle. I couldn’t really keep track because I was head down into work and had to trust that the GG knew where he was going.

It’s a nice place and I’m gonna try to ignore that we’re prob’ly in tRump country. The whole thing would be a lot easier without the pandemic. And no we’re not staying in the buildings by the green car. That’s a random photooo… It’s in Napoleon, OH, if anyone cares. It’s a cool car but I wouldn’t let the GG buy it 🐽

First of all, disclaimer. I stole this beautiful woods house pic (without permission) from a text message. I did not take it and it is not my house although I have two woods houses of my own, beautiful too albeit in different ways.

As a bluuuuuue person (nowadays), I didn’t expect to wake up happy but this morning when I grabbed my phone to check the weather, there was an Apple News alert on the lockscreen proclaiming that one of the peach state races had been called in favor of the blue guy. Yay!!! What about the other one? At 0-skunk-30 it was still close but “we” were cautiously optimistic. And YES! I don’t think it was until afternoon that it was called in favor of the OTHER blue guy! YAY said this social liberal/fiscal (but COMPASSIONATE) conservative who grew up in a “red” family back when the GOP still had a heart.

Of course by that time, we were focused on some other HORRIFIC happenings. Things that flashed through my mind and others were on the order of “I feel like I’m reading the Handmaid’s Tale” and “this is probably the worst thing I’ve experienced since 911.” Yes, I KNOW that neither of those things exactly equal this. Handmaid’s Tale is fictional and my terrification about 911 was immediately overwhelming while my attempted coup terrification came in bits and pieces as I slowly came to realize the potential implications of what kind of shit was going down in D.C.

And yes, I believe it’s an attempted coup. No matter who started it, the Orange Baboon has used incendiary language in his incessant attempts to undermine our carefully constructed electoral system. Woe to those of us who do not believe his conspiracy theories and woe to those who do and don’t understand that they’ve been hoodwinked. I understand that his followers feel they have been wronged by our society but we’ll go there some other day. If we survive the coup.

Enough for now. I couldn’t look away from news all day but I STILL managed to get a lot of work done. “Wake up happy” is what my sweet [long-dead] mother-in-law said to her 10 children to avoid the Grumpus-in-the-morning thing. That was passed on to many of her grandchildren albeit not mine, who responded to different things. I mean what do you do when a kid won’t get outta bed because a “bad aminal has glued her into her bed”? Jeebus, it is soooo much fun to be a moom 🧡🧡🧡

Er, not kicking it at teleCubelandia, at least not today. Spent all morning deep into I fergit what archaeological digs and all afternoon trying to pull umpteen gazillion little bits and pieces of “stuff” into a coherent “story” about how something works. I meandered around our product “sandbox” for hours setting things this way and that and “processing” (in my brain) the results. I’m getting there. I do NOT want to bug dev/QA who are getting into the busy season of ramping up to the next software release. Better if I learn it myself anyway. At least then I can [maybe] ask intelligent questions.

“We” kicked xmas to the curb today. I helped by holding the xmas tree up while the GG released it from the tree stand. I had proper glubs this time, leather. The last time I had to hold up the tree was after it fell over and I had those crappy little knit glubs. He did all of the rest. I’ll leave the outdoor string of xmas lights on for a while… March maybe? You never know. My s-i-l The Beautiful Gay keeps a xmas tree up year-round and once we were there during a TORRENTIAL rainstorm in July and she turned it on. It was MAGICAL!

We doggedly stick to the tradition of getting a “real” once-live tree. Our method of tree removal was quite mundane. The GG simply dragged it out the back door. We’ll eventually burn it in the back yard faaaarrr pit. Our Manchester woods beach urchin sent a dramatic video in which their xmas tree was thrown off their second story deck and it sailed down into the ravine below. Well done sir!

Back at teleCubelandia after one of the un-vacationy-est vacations ever. But really it was okay. I am surprisingly, well, I was gonna say sanguine but looking it up, it doesn’t exactly fit, as optimistic and positive are part of the definition. I don’t feel optimistic or positive exactly but I also don’t feel pessimistic or negative. I just am.

As I was slow-driving over to the Plum for curbside this morning I couldn’t help missing my old Zen Commute to Cubelandia. But once I got home, I faaarrred up my work laptop and got to it. I spent the morning like most others probably were, figuring out what the heck I do for a living. By afternoon I had a good to-do list and I had researched px/em font units and that’s about when I started getting pinged. What about this? What about that? By late afternoon I was head-first into a rabbit hole. Fortunately not a rabbit hole on the dark side of Mercury. Although the harmoniums might’ve been fun.

All of our usual meetings got canceled for the duration of the holidays and that was fine. But we did talk beforehand about how important these meetings are for all of us now that we all telecommute all the time. I may zone out if the dev team is going on and on about something technical that I have nothing to do with but I am there [bdah bdah bdah, what were you guyz talking about I was multi-tasking… or using the bathroom… or texting with someone… or whatever…] if they need me for something. American voices, Indian-American voices, Indian-India voices, and a special Russian voice.

It was good to get back to meeting with people even if remotely. We do daily “stand-up” meetings plus weekly touch-ins with our team. My team is me and Amazon woman and we spent most of our Monday meeting today talking about that funky shit that went down on the phone over the weekend. Our Indian sub-continent colleagues were apparently pretty horrified and she had to try to ‘splain current ‘murican polly-ticks to them this morning.

I do have to say I am thankful that we don’t have video on during our meetings. We can only see our badge photos. Mine is actually not that bad. It looks a lot like one of my OLD college ID pics believe it or not. Amazon Woman, who is GORGEOUS, once said, “I don’t want *anybody* looking at me this morning!”

I need to stop sneaking looks at Twitter I guess. I use it as a news aggregator but it’s making me CRAY-ZEE. Today the Orange Toddler-in-Chief spent an hour or so on the phone ranting and raving incoherently at Georgia’s Secretary of State, who VOTED for Trump. Really? REALLY? We’ve got to get him out. We’ve got to get him out. WE’VE GOT TO GET HIM OUT!

Oops. Sorry but I STILL don’t understand his popularity. Not to mention all the terrification about AOC and Bernie taking over and converting our country to socialism or whatever. George Soros is gonna pay for it, don’tcha know? [That’s SARCASM!]

The pic is what Old Man Winter was doing as I was walking into the schoolyard at 0-skunk-30. Multiple weather apps told me it was not snowing. Oh yeah? I was quite wet when I got back and I shivered for a while (in a comfortable way) under a blanket on the Green Couch. Eventually it stopped snowing except it looked like it was *still* snowing because the temperatures warmed up enough that big clumps of snow were falling out of the trees. I mean CONSTANTLY!

I finished Sirens of Titan. What a ride! I love books where people with no particular training just hop onto various “flying saucers”, push a button and zoom off to Mars or Mercury (forgot about Mercury) or wherever. No thought to supplies like food, etc., whatsoever. I’ll leave it at that in case you haven’t read it and want to. What an imagination!

In a complete shift of gears, Kristin Lavransdatter is next up. Another family read or partial one anyway. I used to eyeball this book/series down at the original Borders store on State and Liberty but never got around to reading it.

And I made my third batch of Chex mix for the season. We don’t really eat cereal so I am trying to get rid of it. Last year it hung around until it got stale and I threw it in the compost.

Back to teleCubelandia tomorrow, HI HO!

The pic is from a couple years ago on a Friday evening walking downtown to meet up at the Oscar Tango or wherever for dinner. We don’t do that any more and we did NOT have a clear sky with a full moon today. Nope. Gray fugliness ALL day. Although my salted sidewalk was pretty much dry by this afternoon, it never got quiiiiite warm enough to melt the snow anywhere else. But this is the Great Lake State and it’s winter…

I remember a high school beach urchin once asking – in January – moom, is it gonna snow again? I kinda knew that she was really asking something like, in the next few hours or whatever but I couldn’t help cracking up. I start to relax about snow sometime in March here but we can get snow until sometime in May. When we open the moomincabin on Memorial Day weekend, there is always residual snow in the woods, sometimes a LOT of it.

I finished my Goodreads 2020 reading challenge at 112 books, 12 books over. Does that sound like a lot? My kids are kind of amazed but I think they need to remember all of the books I read to them when they were children. I read to them at night. I read to them at breakfast. I read to them long after they were independent readers. I read picture books when they were small but we started in with “chapter” books well before kindergarten, Charlotte’s Web and Wind in the Willows are two I remember off hand. And “Indian in the Cupboard” on the beach to multiple generations. I did a lot of things wrong as a parent. We all do. Reading was one thing I did right.

The other thing is that while the pandemic has caused a lot of readers to struggle with focus, it had the opposite effect on me. I TOTALLY understand those who are struggling and not sure why I’m not in that particular boat. I do veer toward fiction with a few memoirs thrown in. Beyond that I’m not sure how to define my preferences except I’m not crazy about romance, chick lit, beach reads (usually), or anything too “light” or formulaic. I have been getting more into, whaddya call ’em, crime novels? Well-written ones though. For example, I read Tana French’s Dublin murder books and I don’t consider them formulaic.

The last two books I read in 2020 were memoirs. A WILD one by a woman who defected from North Korea and then brought her family out. Another totally different one by a southern woman of color (black mother/white father) whose mother was brutally murdered by her second ex-husband (i.e., not the author’s father). I loved both of these books and their authors. Forces of nature.

I started “Mexican Gothic” on New Year’s Eve and it is my first finished book for 2021. My taste can be a little weird so it might not be everyone’s cuppa but I loved it, especially the protagonist who is a, uh, force of nature. It featured a wildly dysfunctional family living in a “mushroom house”, which I won’t explain. And then today, I started Vonnegut’s “The Sirens of Titan”. I read that book in high school and couldn’t remember ANYTHING about it. This is a kind of a family read although I don’t think we will be scheduling meetings to have deep intellectual discussions about it. We’re just having fun.

We had it all today: snow, sleet, rain, ice, you name it. Very little accumulation and overall too warm and wet to be very slippery, at least not when walking or driving at slow speeds. There were accidents on the freeways all day. People, slow down fer kee-reist! I did not drive today. No need to.

Luke of Perrynet shamed me into going out to “shovel” the maybe half inch of slush we got. I wore my Yax but not sure they were really necessary. I did put some salt down after I “shoveled”. If the temps go down overnight, the sidewalk will get slick. He may have beat me out there to shovel but I was the first to put my garbage carts out for early morning pickup. But LofPNet follows my lead on holiday weeks. He doesn’t really do Twitter, I don’t think.

This pic is another recycled one from pre-COVID days, 2019 at the cFam xmas party. Today’s wintry mix was anything but photogenic and I was sent a couple of pics of sleepy/lazy people out at the Mouse Nest but I’m sure nobody wants those posted. Today was a PERFECT day to be sleepy/lazy BTW. These folks are all good citizens and work VERY hard. Not all millennials (or whatever they are) are lazy, entitled kiddos living in their parents’ basements and I wish some of my facebook “friends” would stop posting memes to that effect. Uh, not that anyone would be comfortable living in the Landfill Dungeon.

So this is all just filler on a dreary New Year’s Day. We’re supposed to do Virtual OT in a few minutes so g’night and typos be damned.

Yeah, I and a group of other people received this photo FOUR times this afternoon! The spammer finally explained that his phone kept telling him it was not delverwd. Yes, delverwd. Autocorrect can get you into trouble but not using autocorrect has its own problems.

One of my worst autocorrect failures was when I was at the moomincabin one summer and a beach urchin texted me to let me know she had landed safely in SanFran, her then home. It was the middle of the night and I texted XO, then promptly crashed back out. In the morning I realized it had been corrected to SO. Like, so what. Indeed.

The spammer is up in the yooperland and was snowshoeing the Castle Rock section of the North Country Trail. No, I didn’t go. Traveling during the pandemic has caused me almost more stress than anything else. I did make it to the moomincabin a few times. I think it was four? The good thing about the moomincabin is that weeeee own it and we could be there alone, with the natural social distancing a sparsely populated beach offers. The hard thing was pre-planning meals for 10 days here on the Planet Ann Arbor and schlepping all of that food up there. I spent $400 for that particular trip, plus the GG braved our fave Best Choice at Hoton Lake for prime rib rib-eye steaks on the way up.

So, a kinda familiar looking vee-hickle pulled up in front of the Landfill this afternoon but who/what? When the driver emerged, I saw that it was my DayTwa beach urchin. She was on her way to spend the New Year with the Manchester woods beach urchin. We were able to visit a bit in the front room. Masked of course. Her sister arrived (with a whine drop for me) and they both left after that. Hug with DayTwa sis but not younger sis, who is a grocery worker but I do at least SEE her more often if on the other side of a glass storm door.

Both beach urchins seemed worried that their baggy old moom would be alone for the New Year. No no no no no! I am comfortable here. I have some leftovers for dinner tonight and a wee bit of filet for tomorrow night. I am finally seeing a faint light at the end of the pandemic stash. It’s easy enough to get contact-free food now (at least here on the Planet) that I no longer stock up like I did in the beginning. I mean back in March/April I would stock up and then… Every day at about 3:00, I would have to pull myself out of a total fog about what’s for dinner. It’s a lot easier to shop now, thank you Zeus.

I got rid of two out of four boxes of gallon freezer bags today. They were the results of one of those pandemic shopping debacles. I needed ONE box of the quart size. I ordered them from Amazon. Except I misread BOTH the bag size AND the QUANTITY I was ordering.

The beach urchins, like all millennials (or whatever the heck they are), have been [nicely] shaming me for overuse of ziplock bags for a few years now. They were right and by January 2020 I was hardly buying any at all. Then the pandemic hit. I still use fewer than I did pre-pandemic but probably more than a year ago. Sometimes, for various reasons, they are the only thing that works. The beach urchins recognize this reality and each of them took one box🧡🧡🧡

Happy New Year to all of my nine (or is it five) readers. I hope 2021 is better than 2020 but am only cautiously optimistic.

I was feeling kinda grumptacious this morning. I bagged my walk because I wasn’t sure exactly what Old Man Winter was lobbing at us but it seemed like ICE, which I didn’t want to deal with in the dark, even with Yax. And I can’t find my green REI hiking pole, which got me through the icier parts of the Polar Vortex winter (2014) and the GG can’t even remember it even though he bought it for me🤷‍♀️ It used to rattle around the Frog Hopper so I thought maybe it’d been transferred to Mooon Yooonit but no luck.

I totally fergot about my Wednesday FaceTime with MMCB today until my phone “rang”. Oh yeah! MMCB₂ is not on Bubbe duty this week so we had the pleasure of her company, always positive, cheerful, empathetic, whatever!🧡

We took a rain ride out into the county this afternoon. The GG had “a plan” and it turned out to be tracing the paths of various towers of power. Lucky-shuckial power, that is, not musical power. I might’ve picked a different trip but I was running on low psychological energy today, meaning I had no plan. So this one was interesting enough but I won’t go into detail about it. I do enjoy musing about the juxtaposition of the organized design of nature (trees) and the organized design of engineers (towers and power lines). It’s impossible for a bear of little brain (aka meeeee) to put that into intelligible words.

I shouldn’t leave on a negative note but I am SOOOOO frustrated by so many people’s (I think I used that apostrophe correctly? Mrs. Pratt?) approach toward COVID-19 prevention. People that attended a mask-optional Republican party function (in NY?) that featured a CONGA LINE have tested positive. What was the organizer’s response? Something like, “Adults can make their own decisions.” I AM SORRY! Yes, that is true! BUT! You want to take your own COVID risk? Fine. Except NOT FINE! You may get COVID and not have symptoms. But what about the folks YOU get sick by running around breathing in their faces? And how do you know that you will not, in fact, get sick? goddamn goddamn frickin’ dammit.

I’m pretty sure that who COVID kills is not [totally] random but us humans don’t know what the algorithm is. Yes, it mostly kills “old” people but it ALSO kills young people. Like the 41-year-old elected congressman in Louisiana who left two little kids behind. I dunno if he was attending maskless parties or what. It’s a tragedy no matter. He was a Republican. I’m not sure who will replace him but whatever party they embrace, I hope they understand how dangerous the coronavirus is and will try to encourage their constituents to comply with the rules, at least the ones that our epidemiologists have been able to cobble together.

People, de-politicize this. MASK UP and stop gathering in unsafe ways.

This post is LIGHTLY fact-checked. My googler is a bit outta steam today. As always, I welcome corrections. But not if they devolve into conspiracy theory diatribes🐽

Love y’all, KW

P.S. LOL. The GG and I just had the silliest “fight” in the Landfill Chitchen!🤣 His weapon was a tea towel and mine was a wet dishcloth. We have soooo much fun🤣 And now we’re listening to Rubberband Man…

After yesterday’s puano blahg, my blahggy friend Margaret and I got into a wee side convo. It reminded me that waaayyyy back in the day, part of an aspiring elementary school teacher’s college curriculum was learning to play the piano!

I remember my Lincoln School kindergarten teacher Mrs. Ryan playing the piano and I think she was pretty good (and I would probably have noticed if she wasn’t). I have a hard time believing that the public schools actually expected people to learn how to play the piano in order to get a teaching certificate. A person is either musical or not. Not to mention that playing music in front of an audience (even kids) is very anxiety-inducing for most people. It figures into why I didn’t pursue a career in music in the long run. I fell into the IT biz and it’s been good. (Knock on wood.)

By the time the Planet Ann Arbor beach urchins went to kindergarten at the public school in our back yard, there were no pianos around. I don’t think elementary school teachers are required to learn basic piano nowadays. There were a lot of other things different about kindergarten at Haisley than my own Lincoln but we won’t go there for now.

My kids both had a WONDERFUL 3rd grade teacher who was a fantastic musician and kept a piano in his classroom. Whatever else he did with the piano, he taught the kids their multiplication tables by playing a piano piece of his own, the Multiplication Blues. He was wonderful and I thought it was great. I do have to wonder what my younger beach urchin thought. She had figured out how to count by threes before kindergarten and probably already had the times tables figgered.

At least none of us grew up in North Korea but that would be a whole ‘nother story.

Note that neither of theez guyz (GG and Porter) are puano players! Oh nosiree. I cannot remember what “piece” they were playing that night but they are both pretty much one-trick ponies when it comes to playing da puano. I love them ANYWAY and whatever they were playing they were HILARIOUS!

Yes, the puano is red. My mother-in-law The Beautiful Sally painted it red. Red was HER COLOR! It is a player puano. The mechanism used to work when we adopted it (when my in-laws moved to Crazy Old Florida) but it doesn’t any more. I would like to hire a pro to refurbish and another pro to tune it but I live with a big-time DIY-er and it ain’t happening. Anyway, I haven’t played it in years.

I at least have years of training and serious practice behind me (many years ago). I was like three and I would be at my grandparents’ or aunt/uncle’s house(es) in Sault Ste. Siberia on holidays and I would be banging on their puanos like nobody’s business. I was NOT Mozart and I was NOT making music but I’ve never really met a musical instrument that I couldn’t QUICKLY master, at least in rudimentary terms. (Except the clarinet but we’ll talk about that some other time🐽 And flute has been one of the loves of my life but we’ll go there some other day too.)

My parents were not wealthy and a puano was a stretch for us. Nevertheless, my parents always encouraged any musical (and other) pursuits my brother and I had and I think I was in about third grade when The Commander finally came up with a puano.

My local cousins had all taken lessons and they used the Leila Fletcher series. I have always been a self-starter and I began with book 1 and got myself all the way up to about book 4. I couldn’t work out how to count dotted quarter note rhythms at first but my cuz Uber Kayak Woman set me straight on that during one of her family’s visits from Alaska or wherever they were at the time. (10-year-old successfully teaching 10-year-old.)

About that time, The Commander said something like, “You are going to take puano lessons.” I wasn’t crazy about that idea but she set me up with my local cousins’ teacher Mrs. Diecke and I quickly learned that having a private teacher was a GOOD thing.

Well, having a private teacher is a good thing unless your puano teacher tries to make a, you know, move on you, like happened to me my sophomore year in college. We’ve talked about that before and I GREW A PAIR at that point and have never really been seriously sexually harassed since.

The “puano”? That’s what my older beach urchin called pianos for a while when she was an early talker. Banana was buana and sometimes when I was doing something on whatever computer I had at the time, she would tell me “Mama, stop doing the puano.”

It was another quiet day at the Landfill. And then. About a half hour ago… WHAT WAS THAT? It was the sound of something falling in the Back Room. What was it? It was the xmas tree! Oh fun.

A not very fun half hour of trying to get the tree upright and stabilized ensued. It featured meeeeee standing for inordinate lengths of time holding the tree up while the GG tried (and failed) to screw it back into the stand. Those needles are SHARP! I had to grab glubs and the ones I grabbed were the 50-cent Meijer kind. I have about a gazillion pairs of those and they are GREAT for walkin’ in the winter wonderland but they were not much help protecting against poky pine needles.

It was also kinda grumpy. I do not do well working together with the GG on this kind of prodject. First of all, it required engineering and I am a “patterns” person, not a “story problem” person. Just ask my brother the engineer. If you can figger out how to contact someone who has passed into the great beyond. Second, the GG has an identical twin and he is NOT me. I do not think they communicate telepathically. I do think their brains work similarly and also that they spent many years in very close proximity and are accustomed to working on prodjects together. The Twinz of Terror together get sh*t done and I usually try to stay outta their way! His twin was not here today and I am a substandard substitute.

I did my best although I chafed at being told at least FIVE TIMES not to step in the spilled water from the tree stand. Eventually he banished me and managed to shore it up somehow with twine and I dunno what else. Apparently the tree stand is “worn out” so I guess that’s our first purchase of 2021. For now, hopefully his fix works out until it’s time to take it down.

This roomrater is a mixed bag and I’d give it MAYBE 5 out of 10. I think RR would like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Faaaarrarms, and Explosives back there behind yer fav-o-rite blahgger’s head. And there’s some interesting art on the back wall: a moon-phase calendar (ruined by glare), somebody’s old (waaaaay pre-MAGA) camouflage hat, and an old painting of boots and a knapsack by one of the Sherman brothers. I can’t remember if it was Pete or Jim but they were lifelong friends of my old coot, all members of the Veteran Greenhorns in the yooperland in the 1930s. I don’t remember a time in my life when that painting wasn’t around and now I own it. Alas, there’s a whole bunch of clutter crapola back there. We have GOT to restart our flinging prodject.

This was our first facetime session yesterday, with three of my parents’ four granddaughters and their SOs. Good times. We squeezed in dinner before another facetime session, this time involving porterization. We [almost] always get porterized on Friday night, virtually since March 20, 2020. More good times until the GG curtailed it. The Porters are night owls, we are larks. Something like that. In the summer, we love to drive our motor bote up the upper St. Marys River from our cabin to their cabin at the crack of noon and blow a loud horn from out in the water. GOOD MORNING! 🐽

It was a fairly slothful day for most of us. I walked early but it was a shorter walk than usual because I didn’t drag myself outta the rack until 6:30 or so. At this time of year, I like to be home in time to sit by the front window and contemplate the world while it’s still dark. After that? Cleaned up the chitchen and some other minor chores and read.

Freakout of the day? Where is that other balaclava? “We” have three Smartwool balaclavas. *I* had ONE a few years ago and I was getting suited up early one frigid morning and couldn’t find it ANYWHERE! The GG was rattling around up north somewhere and HE HAD ABSCONDED WITH IT! I immediately ordered two more! So today? He sheepishly admitted he had LOST one in Ohio(!?!?!?!) And couldn’t find the other one. Oh yeah, oops, it’s in my North Country Trail “stuff”. So if you are having trouble keeping score here, we now have TWO Smartwool balaclavas. Until the other two that I IMMEDIATELY ordered from REI arrive.

As much as I hate MAGA, I kinda wish I could order a couple red balaclavas just for the GG. They come in black and gray and I prefer black but maybe if he had some RED ones, he wouldn’t keep stealing my black ones. Marriage is sooooo much fun 🐽

P.S. I chose well🧡

I’m not sure WHY I was surprised when I woke up to a couple inches of snow at 0-skunk-30. This IS Michigan and that’s what it does here. But it wasn’t really in the forecast. And then it went on almost ALL day. Mr. Golden Sun made a mid-morning attempt if you can see that little bit of light in the photooo (between the trees, behind the waaaarrrrs). That’s what we sometimes call a “weak sun”. And then he totally disappeared.

Oh well, at least nobody had to drive anywhere today. Like many other people, my family did NOT “gather” for xmas this year. My family at this point consists mainly of us, two daughters and their SOs. I mean I have a huge number of cousins but we don’t gather with them for holidays. The GG’s fam usually has a big party the weekend before xmas or thereabouts but we did not do that this year. It’s always a lot of fun but I don’t think anyone felt deprived because it didn’t happen.

If anything, it was a less stressful holiday than usual. My s-i-l The Lady of Linden, who has a big enough house to be able to host the 50 or so people the cFam has become for the pre-xmas party, has GOT to be feeling more relaxed this year. It’s a HUGE undertaking even with take-out food and she deserves a break even if the reason sucks. Here we usually have our adult daughters over (their SOs have families too!) for xmas eve and day, so it isn’t really a big deal but this year it was much less. And fewer gifts too. I think EVERYONE was relieved about that. We all have tooooo much stuff.

I was feeling a wee bit down earlier in the week because I hadn’t seen the Detroit urchin since July… Oh wait, she stopped by Saturday after Thanksgiving for an outdoor visit. Anyway, we did a masked gift exchange with her on Wednesday and I felt better for doing that.

So, neither kiddo was alone for the holiday and we were all texting ALL day! We usually avoid that kind of thing. I know parents who constantly text with their adult children and I am not a fan. But on a holiday it’s A-OK. And in a few minutes, we are meeting up online with our kids and our Hawai’i niece. Gotta go!

Back just quick! Fun Facetime. Duck and mashed potatoes were great. Parsnips a bit “fiber-y” and I over-roasted the brussel sprouts and we both managed to make what amounts to gravy🐽 But it’s all good. Would rather be facetiming with kiddos than micro-managing xmas side dishes.

Merry merry, g’night, and typos be damned. KW

I started a curbside pickup order at the Plum on Monday. It was Tuesday by the time I got to the $50 minimum. It doesn’t take much to get to that. It’s an “upscale” grokkery and I buy “upscale” foods. I mean I don’t neeeeeed much of anything else, at least not very often. 12 year old vee-hickle, seven year old laptop… In 2019 we replaced a dryer that was old enough to drink. You get the idea. And I don’t really need clothes any more although if I see something I like I order it. Hello black and metallic red ribbed Chico’s turtleneck.

I am off the track already. By the time I topped the Plum order threshold on Tuesday, it was looking like the pickup slots were going fast so I pulled the trigger and scheduled it for this morning. After that I had until 8:00 this morning to add things to it. I thought I had it all but then the GG decided to walk over there and did I need anything? Well. I don’t like him hanging around inside stores but that’s a whole ‘nother convo. Yes… I need scallions and mushrooms (actually I shouldda checked on mushrooms because I DID have mushrooms, oh well).

All right, now we really are set. Or so I thought. I was banking on the last time I cleaned out the refrigerator, like two weeks ago, I had horseradish. I could NOT find horseradish today to save my life. The GG offered his help. I mean, this is a man who has been known to miss KETCHUP when it’s staring him in the face and I can see it from the next room. But what the heck. Another pair of eyes can be helpful. He could not find it. Did he take it on one of his boondoggles and use it up? He couldn’t remember.

As this little Landfill play was taking place, there was an incoming text message from my Plum beach urchin. “Do you guys need any dessert?” We don’t eat a lot of desserts and we have a generous piece of pineapple upside down cake from my s-i-l The Beautiful Gay, one of her signature dishes. I figgered we’d eat that. So I asked for horseradish! We’re also getting a half pecan pie because the GG requested it. I hope we finish it…

Horseradish? I like it with filet and we’re having that tonight. I soooooo often fergit the horseradish. But I’m also gonna mash it into some turnips with sour cream and scallions. Hey, turnips are pretty dern good when you get them straight from actual farmers and I did since these were part of an Argus Farm Stop delivery. Goetz Family Farm. Blissville. Lettuce all winter.

The GG took this pic. It was one of those “I’m at the grokkery store, is this what you want” throw away shots but I think it’s a pretty good one.

Stop 0: Kroger for beer. Stop 0? Because I hadn’t climbed onto the roundabout at this point. I was putting my work laptop to bed for the duration. Timesheets and Outlook away message. Oh, and putting on some eye make-up, which I have worn maybe five times since about April.

Stop 1: Plum Market to give our beach urchin her new iPhone with its restored backup from the GG’s computer. Purchased yesterday and dropped off at the Landfill at 0-skunk-30 this morning for the restore.

Stop 2: yule logs to the Planet Ann Arbor House of Porterization. Fire wood is impossible to get this year. Who knows why? You can’t use it to, uh, wipe and it doesn’t disinfect anything, in fact sometimes it brings vermin (aka bats) into the house. Yes really. We ordered wood waaaaay early, like August, and managed to snag some.

Stop 3: Detroit to exchange gifts with our other beach urchin, everyone masked. GG snooped around as always and absconded with a book. Quite a bit of “not all of your gifts have arrived yet” on both sides. ’tis the 2020 season 🐽

Stop 4: Flint to deliver a gift (and beer, Bud, from Kroger) to FlaMan. Gift? Mini-drone. We’re wondering how long it’ll take him to crash it into the ceiling🐽 It’s okay. He’s our brother and we love him *anyway*🧡🧡🧡

Stop 5: Hooooommmmme.

Oh man, the GG’s mood at the beginning of the roundabout? Twitchy as all get out. I finally said something like, “If you don’t settle down the impatient driving style and quit fidgeting, just take me home.” It reminded me of the day we dropped our first beach urchin off at college. He just wouldn’t settle down and *she* finally took me aside and said, “Can you get dad to settle down?” (She remembers this to this very day.) You’d’ve thought it was *his* first day at college. Except not. His parents didn’t drop him off at college. They said something like, “You’re just going to college. We’re going to Houghton Lake.” Fifth out of 10 kids… It’s okay. His high school girlfriend drove him.

Shortly after we got home, I heard the distinctive sound of a beer can (Two-Hearted, from Plum) being opened and maybe a half hour after that, he was sound asleep. Nap in a can. He slept for a loooonnng time 🐽 To be fair, he has “done” most of our hunkered down xmas this year plus trying to make spirits bright for others. I’m sure he is tired.

’tis the season and I’m bumping up against use or lose as usual. I got a lot of good productive stuff done at teleCubelandia today so I am about 80% done with organizing the training session I have to run sometime next month. Feels good to get that much outta the way although knowing me, I’ll fergit it all by the time I have to dredge it up again 🐽

So last year at this time, I had (I thought) kicked a post-Thanksgiving cold virus to the curb. Except I sorta started coughing again, or was I *still* coughing? Did that cough ever completely go away? I couldn’t figger it out. I wasn’t terribly sick except I was coughing a LOT! Knowing I wouldn’t be missed at Cubelandia at this time of year (NO ONE was ever there during the holidays), I took a sick day in amongst my remaining vacay. Even though I was not that sick. Except for the insane coughing. And a lot of nose blowing.

Y’all are guessing where I’m going with this. I KNOW, intellectually at least, that COVID was not supposed to have been in the US last December. My symptoms were limited to extreme coughing and nose-blowing (Kleenex anyone) and I didn’t get anyone else sick that I know of. I don’t spend a lot of time dwelling on this possible conundrum. It probably was just a regular cold but it does continue to tickle my brain, just because there are so many things about the coronavirus “we” still don’t know. I know I could get tested for antibodies but I’m not sure I would get a definitive answer, not to mention that other people are in greater need of testing, not to mention vaccines. But still.

Whatever I had a year ago, I continue to follow the virus “rules” and hope it doesn’t sneak in through the corners of my drafty windows and doors. Which “we” now know it can’t really do. It is transmitted by breathing infected people’s air. Even those who are asymptomatic!

Mask up, people, and don’t gather.