Random bits of my so-called life.

Today is a snowy solstice but not anywhere near as snowy as this one from a few years ago. It’s in the mid-30s tonight and I dunno how serious the snow will get but I doubt we’ll be shoveling and maybe not even de-icing the sidewalks.

If it’s possible, the last month of 2020 has been even crazier for my little immediate family than the rest of the whole steaming bunch of crapola. Our problems are of the first world variety involving automotive vee-hickles and technological crapola, etc. KNOCK ON WOOD! Because I don’t even want to think what’s next. Praying in my own godless way for NOTHING!

This week we have two vee-hickles in the driveway instead of zero. My laptop has returned from an overnight. It wasn’t in the shop. It was enlisted as a possible backup for a phone problem. I didn’t miss it that much. Although I do have some important files on here, I mainly use it to write my blahg. Those important files? Recipes and photos mostly. I pulled up a recipe tonight. Shrimp Scampi Portofino from I dunno where. Nothing financial is on my laptop.

I am not George Soros 🐽🐽🐽 but I don’t usually pay attention to what I’m spending. I don’t do a whole lot of discretionary spending except on grocks. This month has been an expensive one and I am finding myself at least eye-balling our balances.

Like I could definitely use a new laptop but this one (2013 MacBook Pro) isn’t actually BROKEN, except for the sound and about half of the keyboard lights. Automotive vee-hickle? Hmmmm… Last year somewhere pre-pandemic, I was reluctantly thinking about replacing my Ninja. We like Mooon Yooonit (RAV4) a lot and I was kinda thinking about another one of those. And then… I wasn’t driving to Cubelandia any more and the Ninja was a perfect curbside pickup vee-hickle. So I bagged the whole new car idea.

The new Kayak Woman car issue has resurfaced recently when Ninja (Honda Civic SI) needed new brakes and therefore wasn’t available for others who needed an emergency car. Where are we now? She’s 12 years old. Maaaayyybeee a new Ninja? At this point, we don’t need two cars that can tow things and I don’t need to do snow drives to Cubelandia or anywhere any more, so… We’re thinking about a new Ninja. But. I really want a manual tranny and have been getting mixed signals about that. Man oh man, I still want to drive manual. Please don’t make that go away.

Good solstice to y’all. Cheers!

I was hoping against hope that I would get a glimpse of the Saturn/Jupiter conjunction. Things didn’t look promising. It has been fugly cloudy and gray for daaaaayyyys. This afternoon Mr. Golden Sun peeked out from behind a cloud bank and then destroyed it!

In the end I *think* I saw the conjunction. I was in the driveway using SkyView on my iPhone to figger out where the planets were. I knew they were pretty low on the horizon and I probably couldn’t see them through the houses and trees in the neighborhood. So I walked over to the schoolyard and eventually got to a place where I could see it. Hello. There were other PEOPLE over there doing what I was doing so I had to do a bit of hopscotch because I was maskless. I had one in my pocket but getting the straps around my ears *inside* my balaclava was too much.

The pic is a screenshot from SkyView, an app I downloaded years ago to track objects in the sky. You may be using a different app. I’m sure there are a bajillion of them out there. No way was I gonna get a pic with my iPhone.

I’m trying to grab onto a bit of xmas spirit. Today I planned to decorate the tree that the GG got and put up on Friday and put out my Santa collection. I didn’t get either of those things done but I did manage to de-clutter the front living room, enough that Roooooomba could run pretty much everywhere, i.e., no boxes or bags on the floor anywhere.

I am now working on a FOURTH bag of bags. For YEARS, I backpacked my grocks from the Plum. When I drove somewhere for grocks, I brought my own Chico bags or whatever. When I do curbside pickup from the Plum they very carefully pack my grocks into double paper grocery bags. Problem? You know what the problem is. Go back to the first sentence in this paragraph. (And do NOT get me wrong, the Plum curbside pickup is the BEST and I LOVE those folks!)

I *could* just throw these bags in the recycle cart and for a while, I was doing that. But they are beautiful, pristine bags so it’s a little hard to send them to wherever for whatever they do with them. The Scrap Box has advertised that they accept paper grocery bags but their rules for donating things are a bit unclear to me at the moment. Yes, Garbage Woman is falling down on the job. I reorganized that mess today and put it in another room besides the front living room.

I *did* turn on the lights today! I mean I plugged in the string of multi-colored xmas lights that has been along the front overhang for YEARS. People say things like, “It was warm out this weekend so I put up the xmas lights”. I always reply with, “Yeah, I plugged mine in.” So that’s what I did today. Late in the afternoon after the gloomiest day on earth. I don’t get depressed but this was a little much. On days like this, I actually love the dark at the beginning and end of the day.

The lights in the pic? Xmas morning 2011 at The Commander’s house in Sault Ste. Siberia. She was living at Freighter View assisted living then (but still owned her house) and this turned out to be her last xmas but we won’t go there today. We drove up there with our contingent of her grandchildren to cook xmas dinner for her in her house. I’m sure she was totally p*ssed off that she hadn’t cooked it herself. We put up a string of xmas lights on her front window and this is a pic I took when I was up early and enjoying a few quiet minutes of Moom Alone.

Those are not the first colors I knew. I think the first colors I knew the names for were red and green. Xmas related? I’m not sure but probably. These were followed by yellow and blue and until I got to kindergarten, whenever I thought about colors, my brain went red-green-yellow-blue. Kindergarten opened me up to rainbow colors. I am not an indigo fan, at least not in rainbow colors.

A year or so after that, my lovely and talented teenage cousin Sally, who ended up formally studying art and teaching it, added a whole bunch more rainbow colors to my palette via the 64-crayon Crayola box. Red, Orange Red, Red Orange, Orange, Yellow Orange, Orange Yellow… Maybe you get the idea? I bet she doesn’t remember teaching me about that but I sure do.

I made many crayon “designs” cycling through those colors and was not a happy camper when Crayola “retired” some of them or renamed them with “sexy” names. Like Razzle Dazzle Rose and (HEY) Electric Lime. I was well into adulthood and parenthood by that time but what the heck? They messed with my System! I’m gonna bet it’s possible to buy the original colors on eBay or somewhere but I have enough crapola around here.

I *think* we’re doing virtual Oscar Tango tonight. The GG is rattling around up north somewhere. Yes, again. It’s okay (as long as he doesn’t bring the damn virus home) because I get a chance to be spacified this weekend.

The photooo is a picture from last December over at the House of Porterization. We had JP’s wonderful chili there and I think we did BYOB or something like that. I actually have a pic of their tan and only bathroom from that night which I will not share. Really, the only reason I took a pic of it was because it was a copy of my old blue and only bathroom except in tan and in better shape than mine was. I have heard of a pink “colorway” of this bathroom. Maybe there are others.

We are obviously not gathering in person this year and I am not sure how this turned into a color post but somehow it did. Sometimes I just start randomly blathering and I end up where I end up.

We did do virtual Oscar Tango and as a bonus, we also got to hang out a bit with the Uncly Uncle and The Beautiful Gay, who was driving the getaway car. 🧡🧡🧡

Man oh man, what a busy and EXPENSIVE day! You don’t want to know about the work stuff but the automotive vee-hickle crapola may be of more general interest.

So, where were we? We took the Frog Hopper in for suspension work LAST WEEK! They ordered the WRONG PARTS TWICE. It was FINALLY done today so the GG walked over there to pick it up. But. It was still making the rattling noise that was the original reason to take it in. Sooooo. He took it back. It needs further work but that has been ruled non-critical. BUT. They had failed to tighten up some bolts… … … It is now back home just for the record.

If you’ve been playing along for any length of time, yes, the Frog Hopper was once our vee-hickle. We keep vee-hickles FOREVER and it is now 10 years old with more miles on it than I am strong enough to count. A beach urchin owns it now. We (mainly the GG) were involved in this repair because she is an essential worker (grocery and yes they ARE essential) and the GG is, well, one of his alternate monikers is The Pensioner. Meaning that he has more time to deal with this crapola than she does. Not to mention that he knows cars inside and out and is a MAN so doesn’t take any bullsh*t from mechanics. That shouldn’t still be a THING but it IS. Alas.

And then there is my loverly Ninja, who needed brakes. Even this normally mundane repair turned into a bit of an odyssey. The GG took Ninja over to the Honda dealer and THEY HAD TO ORDER SOME PARTS! Apparently this is a theme. I dunno if it’s related to the pandemic or not. Anyway, after he 1) picked up the Frog Hopper 2) took it back and came home again, he walked over to Honda to get the Ninja. No issues with the Ninja, knock on wood.

Oh yeah, and yesterday we got a recall notice on Mooon Yooonit for fuel pump issues that may cause stalling. They do NOT have a fix for that yet. AWESOME, as some people say. Automotive vee-hickle issues are never ending. But we knew that.

My fave vee-hickle manufacturer remains Honda. Subaru makes great cars but if you own them forever (like we do) the dealer doesn’t really like to schedule you for repairs. Toyota is still an unknown because our first Toyota is a 2019. It was my late automotive engineer brother who steered us toward Honda in the first place and my all-time favorite car was the Dogha, our 2001 Honda Accord. And my brother worked for GM.

The pic is from sometime last year ago when I was stuck in snow and traffic on my drive home, in Mooon Yooonit at a standstill.

Yes, this is an old photoooo. Probably 2016 judging by my iPhone. It was a 6S and that PINK Mophie charging case was a perfect fit.

Anyway, I *think* this pic is in 10,000 Villages downtown on the Planet Ann Arbor. Oh, the good old days when we could walk downtown on a Saturday, have lunch at the Griz and, during the xmas season, we would wander the Planet Ann Arbor shops for trinkets and things for the beach urchins. We are *obviously* not doing that this year.

And those WERE the days. One of the things my cousin Julie and I were able to reminisce about during our phone call yesterday was the good old J.L. Hudson department downtown Detroit store. We both loved to shop there and The Commander worked there as a buyer after college. Julie really lit up when I told her I remembered Northland Mall. It probably wasn’t the first mall in the country but it was very early and an easy Hudson’s satellite store for folks not living in downtown Detroit to get to. I have a pic of me with Santa there when I was a very small child, maybe three. I’m not sure if I remember that or not. I think I remember some of the bling at least. I’ll have to look for the pic.

I loved to shop for quite a bit of my life. At some point in time I just got taaarred of the whole acquisitional lifestyle. I am struggling with xmas this year but I have some ideas and we will get through this.

A quick and dirty pic of our first indoor faaarrrr of the year. December 15. That’s late. I could be wrong but based on certain furtive activities by the GG, I think a big green holiday artifact might be lurking outside somewhere.

Other than that, I sure had an interesting day. It was interesting in the TeleCubelandia sense but we won’t talk about that because it wouldn’t be interesting to y’all. I did invoke the LSCHP’s name a few times, hoping he wasn’t somehow listening in to the convo because we were making a change to one of his signature designs 🐽

Toward the end of my work day, my phone lit up with a Canadian number. I hesitated for a moment but then realized it was Julie, my first cousin once removed. She is my mother’s cousin and I have never met her, although I did meet her younger brother back when I was a little kid. Her mom and granddad were commonly mentioned people in my childhood years. Aunt Lillian and Grandpa Lathers.

Her birth crossed paths with Emily’s death, the grandmother I never met. Emily drove her sister Lillian (who lived across the street in their Detroit area neighborhood) to the hospital to give birth to Julie. On her way home my grandmother Emily was killed in a car crash. I had put this together before from newspaper clippings but it wasn’t something that The Commander talked about that I remember, at least not to me. I’m not sure how we got onto that particular topic but I was happy to hear the story in Julie’s words.

Julie remembers my mom and her siblings with great fondness. They were quite a bit older (The Comm was 15 when Julie was born) and treated her with love and kindness. That leads me to believe that they didn’t displace blame for their mother’s death on her and that is a good thing. But that’s how my family(ies) operate.

Although I grew up knowing my MacMu cousins and encountered a few more distant relatives, Julie and I have never met before. I attribute this to The Commander’s marrying my dad and moving to the yooperland AND Julie’s marriage to a Canadian man and subsequent move.

We had a great time talking and have quite a bit in common, music and writing being a couple of them although she is actually a published author. I was touched when she told me my voice sounded like my mom and aunt Charlotte, both Julie’s cousins. I also found her voice to be familiar. I have encountered this phenomenon with my FinFam cousins too…

Here’s to the good parts of the internet, the ones that help us get in touch with relatives that might otherwise be lost to us forever.

Love y’all, KW 🧡🧡🧡

P.S. I may not have known my MacMu biological grandmother but I grew up with Bolette who married my granddaddy a year or so before I was born and was a wonderful step-grandmother. My new-found cousin Julie liked her too.

I won’t blahg about those things today except to say (about the first B) I wonder what the Orange Baboon will try next, now that he’s lost, hmm, I guess it is twice?

Let’s talk books instead. I set up a 2020 Goodreads challenge for 100 books and I think I’m into my 106th right now? I am ending 2020 by alternating between the Dublin murders and the Jackson Brodie detective series. In the last half of 2020, I have read a lot of books set in the British Isles, beginning with the whole Poldark series, set in Cornwall. Although my documented ancestors are mainly Scot and Irish, this is random but I’m loving it.

I’m thinking about what to read in 2021 and in the midst of a bunch of Kexting with my daughters today, someone mentioned an old Kurt Vonnegut book. I read a lot of sci-fi in high school and this was a great book and I was suddenly hit with the idea of incorporating a lot of re-reading into my reading “plan”, which is usually a sort of higgledy-piggledy whaddo I wanna read next kind of thing. Maybe this year I’ll alternate re-reads with new reads. It could work, right?

One of the first things that comes to mind is Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. Another is Earth Abides but that’s a pandemic book and I’m not sure I’m quiiite up to it just now. Maybe if V works out, I’ll be ready by next fall.

Veering away from sci-fi, I’m looking at Ayn Rand. Yes really. I read those books when I was very young and idealistic. I liked the Fountainhead. Wow, this is so cool! About halfway through Atlas Shrugged I kinda went meh although I still finished the book. She’s a good story teller and world builder in any case. I wonder what this cynical old bag (meeee) will think about her books now as I and the world have changed so much. I may well get ticked off and quit without finishing. But we’ll see…

How ’bout Gone With the Wind? When I read it as a kid, it was largely ball gowns and fancy food and slaves who loved their masters. I’m pretty sure I didn’t understand the history and politics of the time. What will I think of it now against the backdrop of the Trumpian Bombasty, the seeming rise of White Supremacy (again, sigh), and Black Lives Matter. I am a WASPy type person but I care about PEOPLE. I don’t care what they look like. Sorry if you disagree.

That’s off the top of my head in this blahg-writing moment. What did you read a long time ago that you might want to re-read? It might be something I want to put on my list, whether I’ve read it or not.

Orange hearts to all! 🧡🧡🧡

Alternate title? “And then there was one.”

Yes we are having loads of fun. My mouse dropped off my loverly little Ninja early this morning and walked to work. I wanted to take a slooooowww drive this morning to check out the river and maybe Swan Corners and a few back roads or whatever. I started by driving the river drive. Everything was all right. And then I got to Dexter. I had to stop for a stop sign. Scrrrraaaaape. Okay, that does not sound good. Brakes? Yup.

And this meant that *potentially* FOUR people might be forced to share ONE vee-hickle. A vee-hickle that was rattling around somewhere up north.

I hightailed it back to the landfill, parked, and called the GG. “Where *are* you?” I used to be pretty aware of his whereabouts because I would get an email whenever he bought gas. He has recently joined 21st century fintech and is using a payment method that doesn’t notify me about anything so I had no clue. Iggy? Hiking? Gaylord? Hoton Lake? Turned out he was southbound on the I75 SUV Speedway north of Gaylord. The road had been bad but was improving.

He abandoned his plan to stop for another Hoton Lake overnight and drove directly down to the Planet. After taking the Ninja for a drive, he confirmed my broke-brake suspicions. About the only good thing about this was that he arrived about a half hour after my mouse walked back from work so she didn’t have to hang around out in the cold waiting. (She brought me whine 🙃)

The verdict? Yes, it needs back brakes. It isn’t at a critical stage yet so my mouse will drive it until she gets the Frog Hopper back. If this does not work, I suppose the GG and Mooon Yooonit will serve as a chauffeur service for a couple days, ferrying our essential workers back and forth across the southeast Great Lake State. Or a car could be rented. We’ll see. A positive in all this is that Ninja is manual so you don’t have to hit the brakes every time you need to decelerate because you can downshift. At least that’s what my mouse and I are telling each other.

That dirty vee-hickle in the pic is my Ninja. I do not know who those guyz are. The gg probably remembers their names, ranks, serial numbers, and who their wives are and what they do.

Oh the weather looks good this weekend. He said. I thought, “Yeah, roight.” This doesn’t look like a huge snowfall but if the GG says the driving is treacherous, it is treacherous and that’s all that matters. He is in Iggy BTW, no snow here on the Planet Ann Arbor.

Our little extended family is down enough vee-hickles at this point that I do NOT want anything to happen to Mooon Yooonit (oh, not to mention the GG!). Mouse/Raccoon are down two vee-hickles and are carpooling rather long distances in my Ninja. (“My” Ninja? We both own the Ninja but I LOOOOVE my 6-speed manual tranny and am the main driver). The Frog Hopper was supposed to be fixed on Friday but the shop ordered the wrong parts and now we’re looking at Tuesday.

The result is that I do not have an automotive vee-hickle at my disposal this weekend. My driveway is empty. I am okay with this! Really! I got two grocery deliveries today (Plum and Argus). I didn’t need to go anywhere and my “kids” are very hard working essential workers and I will help them out any way I can, which means they can use my car whenever they need to.

We are not anywhere near Warren Buffet (or George Soros 🐽) but these days we are financially able to buy new vee-hickles pretty much whenever we want to, which isn’t very often. Mooon Yooonit is 2019 but Ninja is 2008.

I remember when we were first married and we owned two Ford Fiestas. One weekend BOTH of them had bad brakes or something, I can’t really remember. We were car-less for a few minutes until the GG went out and fixed the brakes (or whatever) on one or the other of the Fiestas. He was a DIY guy with cars back then, partly from his upbringing and also because he worked summers at Hamtramck Assembly during college. He did know how to fix cars. Nowadays he doesn’t really do his own car repair work so much. I think at some point he figgered it was easier to pay someone else to do that stuff.

What did I do this quarter? What am I gonna do next quarter? The same old same old. Except it isn’t always the same. I basically create the same kind of document for each of my prodjects but that’s where the similarities end. Each prodject, even some that seem trivial at the outset, push me into new territories and archaeological digs (when and why did we do this?). And how do we want to change it? And it isn’t just writing. It is illustrating with tables, annotated screenshots, flow diagrams, whatever.

WAIT! WHAT? I just heard a clip of tRump NASTILY refusing to answer a question and telling the REPORTER to be NICE! WHAT??? ??? ??? Why why why do so many people worship the Orange Baboon? Read his frickin’ Twitter feed, you guys. Bad orange man. It’s not MAGA. It’s Make tRump Great [again?]. ASSPLODING HEAD ANYONE?

Okay, I fall off when I get to the part about how I want to advance my career. I love my job/career. I am always up to take on whatever interesting work comes along. I am not a young kid at this time and am not looking to take over the company or even take on a management position. I am happy where I am. When it’s time for me to ride off into the sunset, I will find other things to do (peering at fabric stash). But I’m not ready for that quiiiite yet so I hope I am needed for a while longer. You never know in an at will company. But I did complete my performance evaluation today and got it sent off and that is always a relief.

In a way, what I do for a living now is kinda like all the other things I’ve done for a living (or not). Working low-level IT in Operations at That Darn EPA, I was the main problem solver. If there was an ERROR on something, I could usually figger it out. Then there was YAG. Play productions are kinda like the functional specifications that I write now. Every one is the same, yet they are also wildly different.

The pic is of a sorta headless GG in a window seat at the Redhawk restaurant downtown on a Friday. Was it last year? I can’t remember. The GG is at the Driftwood (hopefully masked) in Iggy tonight and we aren’t sure if Virtual Oscar Tango is going to work or not. The Driftwood rooms have iffy internet connections.

Our little family is pretty good at keeping text messaging to a minimum. I can go days without sending or receiving a text and for the most part it’s me and the GG, me and one daughter or another, all four of us, or just me and our daughters. That last if we’re making jabs at some vile polly-tishun. (I guess vile is my new favorite word, since I’ve used it a lot lately.) Occasionally a niece or someone’s significant other is included but we try to be careful not to spam them. I also text occasionally with a few cousins as well as BFF and a couple other friends. Very occasionally Amazon Woman but that’s only when one or both of us is not online via a work device and something important is happening. Like the infamous “work from home tomorrow” text I got the evening of March 12, 2020.

This week has been a bit more busy what with a couple of automotive vee-hickle issues, one involving a deer (driver not injured thank you very much) and the garden variety kind of repair issues related to owning an aging vee-hickle.

Where I am struggling is with xmas lists! We (nuclear fam) got *with* it this year and started putting out xmas lists BEFORE Thanksgiving! We were gonna be ORGANIZED! Problem? It was mostly by text message and I have almost totally lost track of who wants what and who has already purchased what for who and and and…

The good news is that NO ONE NEEDS ANYTHING. A couple/three of us need new laptops and there are those pesky vee-hickle repairs, etc., but those things don’t make exciting xmas gifts. You can wrap up a laptop and put a fancy bow on it but ho-hum, especially considering how difficult it is nowadays to transfer all of your digital “stuff” over to a new musheen. At least that has been my experience. You can stick a bow on a set of taaaars I guess but how would you wrap up a suspension system? I don’t even know what one LOOKS like. Oh, not that any of those things are being gifted, just that they are the most needful things right now. Knick-knacks and chitchen crapola are NOT NEEDED.

It’s okay. We’ll figure it out and it won’t be the usual xmas anyway. But there’s got to be a better way to organize xmas gift lists. In fact, I bet there is an app (or 10 or 20) for that! 🐽

That pic is of ice but it almost looks like a frog face. Does anyone else see that or am I nutso? I took it in December 2011 but not sure where. It may have been on the moominbeach. We were certainly up there that December, looking after The Commander in what turned out to be the last few months of her life…

Yes, this is The Commander aka my mother. We were at the moomincabin and I fergit what I said that made her pull that big kniffy. We certainly weren’t arguing about MAGA! MAGA was years later than this and she, a lifelong republican voter, was by then a strong Obama proponent. Ka-whomp! You go girl.

Mom was an ardent albeit practical feminist but the Republican party moved waaaayyy to the right for her. I know she would NOT have supported the likes of Kelly Loeffler or Kristi Noem. Or Lara Trump. Really? Ugh. Mom believed in science and would’ve been a strong proponent of mask wearing and social distancing. I was born during a multi-year polio pandemic and since she tried for 11 years to have a child until she got meeee, she did NOT want to lose me to polio so I was vaccinated at birth or shortly thereafter. I can just about hear her kvetching after all these years. I am SOOOOO glad she didn’t have to live through this stupid pandemic and the vile people who are ignoring science to politicize a deadly public health issue.

These kniffies remind me of some young boyz (like early 20s) who used to work for the YAG summer theater camp over at the UM STAC facility. I was the YAG administrator for a number of years and we had sooooo much fun at camp. The place didn’t have A/C or any kind of decent outdoor facilities but the kids who signed up year after year after year loved theater and our teachers and format and they just kept coming back and back and back.

Anyway, one morning two of our young male teachers came to work reporting a trip to the ER the previous evening. What did they do? They were practicing sword fighting in their apartment with kniffies or whatever and a kniffy went through someone’s foot. The “victim” started by showing us his most recent wound and then went on to show us a bunch of scars from previous wounds. When he started pulling his pants down to show his appendix scar I put a stop to it although I was also absolutely CRACKING UP!

I forget exactly exactly why he was wielding this big kniffy at me. Were we disagreeing about MAGA? I do not remember. Make no mistake. He is not attacking me with that kniffy in any way. This was staged.

I’m not sure the GG thought he would end up being a coffee boy when he retarrrred a few years ago. He did his thing and I drove over to Cubelandia and whatever.

So I got COVID-dumped into telecommuting last March. I didn’t usually drink coffee at Cubelandia. Sometimes but not usually. So I started to be a full-time telecommuter and the GG started to make me coffee in the morning. And I was pretty okay with that.

I now seem to expect the GG to make me coffee in the morning. Just one or two cups. Yesterday, our cute little Mister Coffee decided to die.

The GG headed out to Meijer for a new coffee maker, which I wasn’t happy about but he does wear a mask. Jeebus.

My cousin Mac whose birthday was today passed away unexpectedly at the beginning of March 2020 just before we all got locked down with COVID. He didn’t die of COVID but it sure was surreal processing his death during that time period. I didn’t see him all that often as an adult but we stayed loosely connected via social media and his occasional visits to our homeland. I sure didn’t expect not to see him again.

Love all of my cousins 🧡🧡🧡

A better pic? Those who responded to yesterday’s question thought it looked like a broken tree or maybe bent. It is not but it was a TERRIBLE picture with all kinds of glare from my LED light strings. As you can see, this is an xmas ornament in the shape of a tree with the Great Lake State cut out in the middle of it. What was wrong with yesterday’s pic was that Michigan was flipped horizontally so that the yooperland peninsula jutted off to the east instead of the west. The Uncly Uncle gave this to me a couple years ago and I love it so much I display it year-round.

As the GG’s identical twin, the UU is my bestest brother-in-law, even though we don’t much agree on polly-ticks🐽. I love my other b-i-ls too, make no mistake, FlaMan and JimC and the two (Gary and Don) who no longer walk this earth.🧡

New gas meter today. How exciting. Not really. It did mark the first time a true outsider entered the Landfill since before you-know-what. We and our family and friends have been VERY strict about gatherings, meeting very distanced in the back yard and masked for bathroom trips into the house. In the beginning my mouse wouldn’t even come inside for the bathroom, P-ing between the She-Shed and the neighbor’s fence. We have all relaxed a weeeeee bit, at least about that if not other things, and I’m okay with people using Eco-Terlet now.

Part of the process to install a new gas meter was that our furnace and water heater were shut off for an hour and a DTE person had to come in the house to make sure they got turned back on without any issues. Our guy was great, masked and friendly. Later in the day I saw a local HVAC business’s truck in the street, its driver talking to the gas meter guys. I surmised that DTE had probably contracted with them in case anyone’s gas appliances did not successfully turn back on. That’s a good thing and this seemed overall to be a particularly well-run infrastructure upgrade prodject.

This is our third gas meter. When we first moved in here, the meter was in the basement. I was a wee bit nervous then about letting “men” into my house when I was alone with my newborn daughter but our meter reader was woman-friendly enough to dispel those fears. What I DIDN’T like was that every time the thermostat got to the point of kicking on the furnace, I could hear it before I could feel the heat/hear the blower because the gas meter would start SQUEAKING. I prefer cold temperatures for sleeping and although the GG agrees with me nowadays it was a battle back then.

At some point an outdoor gas meter replaced that squeaky old thing and I didn’t have to deal with people coming in my house any more. I’m not exactly sure what the most recent change does for us. I’m guessing they don’t have to send meter readers around at all any more? Or are they installing something more “sinister” as some of the conspiracy theorists around here have posited. “Microwaves” to mess with our brains? Something to do with 5G? I do not know! And I don’t particularly care.

I took this picture a couple years ago. I posted it on Instagram (then) and LEFT IT THERE for 24 hours without noticing the issue.

I am recycling old pictures a lot this month because I am not getting much of anything interesting. It is pitch black when I walk in the morning. It’s been graaaaayyyy ALL weekend and I haven’t gone anywhere except for curbside pickups. The gas meter prodject provides a lot of activity in the street from time to time but it’s not all that photogenic. I guess I could’ve taken a pic of the fugliness under the Landfill Chitchen sink today but you didn’t really want to look at rodent crapola did you?

I’ve been picking away at cleaning out drawers and cupboards in the chitchen for the last couple weeks and this is the first place I’ve noticed evidence of mus musculus. The remaining question is why, since I deal with under-the-sink for one reason or another EVERY day, I didn’t notice it before today. The GG whipped into a nearby phone booth, changed into his Supermouse costume, cleaned the whole mess up, and set the traps. I don’t do Mickey Control except for two historic incidents that are too much for today. (Like no, I guess I can’t really call my husband to come home from work to deal with this so WOMAN UP, KW!)

We have always had an intermittent rodent problem in this house. The mice come in, the mice go out. The mice [don’t usually] play pinochle on my snout. We would notice droppings or sometimes even sight an actual Scurry Mouse (as opposed to Puffalump Mouse and hey Mrs. Pratt, did I use “sight” correctly there?). The GG would set traps and put a little dead mouse face for each mouse caught on the dry erase board I used to have on the fridge back then. There were experiments with live traps along the way and I can also remember My Old Coot sprinkling diazinon along the perimeter of the house. Yes, I knooooowww. But it got rid of the ants that we haven’t really had since and the mice too, at least for a while. I’m trying to remember if my dad was actually wearing a face mask as he sprinkled.

Since we gutted our fugly old 70s-era chitchen six years ago, we haven’t had as many rodents. I don’t exactly know why.

First of all, no no no no, I was not stuck behind a couple o’ school buses today. For one thing, it is Saturday. For another, the Planet Ann Arbor is firmly committed to remote school and has been since the beginning, liberal mask-wearing bastion that it is. Third… I don’t drive to work any more but if I did, I wouldn’t encounter school buses.

I did actually drive a bit today. Two curbside pickups (Plum and Whine Castle) and a post office drop off of the moomincabin tax bill. Plum Market? My gal noticed the North Country Trail flyer stuck in a back window and got pretty excited. I was glad the GG was not with me because he would’ve talked this gal’s ear off! And might have outed our Plum insider, who I don’t usually tell people I’m related to.

The Whine Castle was SO BUSY that when I arrived at the parking lot and called in that I was there to pick up my order it took forever for someone to come out. So long that I actually called a second time. While I sat there, umpteen bazillion people parked and went INSIDE the store to buy whatever. That included an elderly man who parked next to me in the handicapped space, struggled to walk to the door, and did not put on his mask until after he entered the building. Trumper? I dunno. Maybe just a person who has lived a long time and is annoyed by the inconvenience of having to enter a building with a mask on and doesn’t understand the science. I was patient. This is a good business and I could imagine how slammed they were and how my small box of booze could be forgotten when other people were in their face, not to mention phone calls.

The post office looked slammed too. What the heck were so many people doing there? Were they going inside to send gifts to people? I do not know. I am ordering gifts online (as usual). I am (mostly) sending them to my house and we’ll figure out contact free delivery. I heaved my seasonal cabin’s tax payment up into the mail slot and drove on. Why are the mail drop boxes calibrated to the height of a SUV and not a Honda Civic SI?

Hey, it’s Christmas time in the city. Roight? It doesn’t feel like xmas to me at all. It feels the same as it did last March when everything was closed and we were all ordered to work at home. Some of us are still working from home. I’m not complaining. I *am* doing whatever I can to help everyone aka you all keep safe.

Today, for the second time since, uh, well, before you know what, somebody knocked on the door! The first time was back in June when the idealistic clean water kids come around on their yearly attempt to extract money from me. During a pandemic? Yes…

I’m not counting the delivery folks who sometimes do a perfunctory bang on the door to alert me that my stuff is here before running back to their vee-hickles. As a full-time telecommuter who works (yes, still) on the Green Couch by the front window, I see almost everything that gets delivered.

I’d’ve been a lot more startled by today’s knock if I didn’t know the gas meter guys had been in my driveway working on the next door neighbors’ meter and were sure to be hitting me up soon. Still, this being a pandemic, my masked meter person knocked, then stepped waaaaay back off the porch so when I went to answer the door, there was nobody there. Duh. I peered around and found him standing off the porch next to the Ninja.

I said, “Hello! Just a sec, I’m gonna grab a mask” and returned (in a sec) *masked* to talk to him about scheduling our meter move replacement. I’m not sure whether *he* cared about *me* wearing a mask (we were waaaaay far apart) but I feel masks are a form of etiquette these days. I care about my fellow human beings so I will wear a mask. I was glad he was wearing one and I’m glad DTE is taking masks and social distancing seriously. The *two* gas meter guys I’ve talked to in person have been total gentlemen!

We are not porterized tonight, at least not in the usual FaceTime way. There are various text threads going along, as well as some with the beach urchins, who are putting up their OWN xmas trees this year, YAY! The pic is last year at the Oscar Tango. The GG snagged a window seat and I took a pic as I arrived.

The GG is on a long weekend of road hiking in Oh-haaaa-oh and he is in a B&B (with private bathroom). Today was a loooonnng day for him and possibly a bit Karen-ish. So he needs some major chill-out time and also has to scrounge for food because you can’t just go to restaurants now or eat food at the B&B.

Nipping in and out of twitter today, I actually watched a few video clips. I normally cannot stand to watch videos on the internet. Most people are absolutely AWFUL videographers. I include myself in that group. Amateur videos always seem to start with NOTHING happening FOREVER and then maybe five seconds of some kind of lame action. And I can’t do more than maybe three minutes tops of clips from speeches/shows/whatever. Today I found myself wanting to hear people’s voices.

My new super-hero, none other than Mary Trump! How on earth did tRump family DNA produce a person who thinks like, well meeeee? She does not think her vile tRumpian uncle will run in 2024. This is exactly my opinion. She states it much more eloquently than I ever could but I think he is dun dun dun and will do something in “the media”. He will want to keep the focus where he wants it, on HIM. I hope Mary and I are not wrong.

Katie Porter where have you been all my life? I have read snippets here and there about Representative Porter and her white board. Today I went down a mini rabbit hole watching her make old white male fossils squirm when they didn’t know the answers to simple yes/no questions. I am in LOVE! This is how I run my life except I don’t because I am waaaaayyy too shy to do what I saw her do today. Do not misinterpret my message here. I am sure she doesn’t limit her laser-focused quest for facts and data to what I called old white male fossils but those I saw today fit that description. Except maybe for Mnuchin but who knows what his hair status actually is. Facts and data please. “I have a few lawyers who report to me” does not answer the question, “Do you have a law degree?” “Yes” or “No” does. And Ms. Porter has a law degree. From Harvard if I have it right.

And then the devil went down to Georgia. I’m not sure why I clicked on that link. It showed ole Landscape Rudy entering some building in Georgia and walking around refusing to answer questions. I saw exactly TWO masks in that whole video and Rudy was shaking hands, etc. The building was not crowded but maskless people were sitting together in groups that suggested they had not been isolating together since March… I mean… Two couples? Or a few men and a woman? Naaaawwww.

Okay, I know that Rudy is NOT the devil but now I can’t get that song outta my head.

That sunset? Me and my mouse saw basically the same sunset although I’m on the Planet Ann Arbor and she’s out in Manchester. And actually the GG is down in O-haaaa-o where he saw a similar sunset.

Those yellow coils? Gas meters are being moved from the back of our houses to the front and this is part of the project.

Inspired by another blogger, I am going to talk about my usual shower thoughts. (Disclaimer: hers are a lot more interesting than mine.)

I suspect my shower thoughts are not associated with the shower as much as the time of day I take a shower. I take a shower FIRST THING in the morning, EVERY morning. I am pretty direct about getting in and out of there quickly. I am an EXPERT at washing long, thick hair so COVID hair is not a problem. And I can reach my entire back with one arm or another (is that TMI?). At the end, I wipe down the shower tile/doors, get dressed, take a walk, and get on with my day.

For whatever reason, as soon as I get in the shower, every dad-blasted day, it’s like, “oh yeah, that”. Memories surface of a horrible period of time after The Commander’s death. As I was picking my way through the aftermath of my mother’s death, dealing with her estate, cleaning out her house, and WORKING, etc., my adult children and I were viciously attacked by lawyers on behalf of someone I thought was a friend. This came totally out of the blue and to this day I have no idea what precipitated it.

The next couple years were absolutely awful. I was badmouthed every which way and worse, which effectively gaslighted me into thinking I had done something wrong. If all the attacker wanted was to make me feel miserable, they totally succeeded. Hey, you won? But why? And what did you win?

In the end, my attacker retreated. Like with tRump’s continued assaults on various states, no one could come up with anything I had actually done wrong. Alas, it was a few years after that before the whole episode stopped invading my thoughts pretty much 24/7. Somehow I managed to continue living and working productively. I guess because I am MEEEEE. I have a successful life and I am surrounded by many more friends than enemies.

I am not “supposed” to blahg about this. I mean my family won’t like it much but it is MY blahg and this is part of my life. And I HAVE gotten beyond it. To a great extent, I don’t think about it much at all. Still, every morning, as soon as I step into the shower I seem to take a moment to reflect upon that time and the person behind it. I throw a little shade their way and get on with life.

I’ve written cryptically today. Some day when I’m old enough to get away with saying whatever I damn well want to, I may tell it all. It’s a cautionary tale to be careful about who you befriend and/or trust especially when stuff is being passed from one generation to the next. For now I don’t generally like it on the internet but it’s part of MY STORY and I realized today that I have reached a milestone of some sort. Onward and here’s to the day I can take at least some showers without thinking about this.

Those packages are not on my dining table today. They were on my table sometime in December 2019. But my table has looked like that for most of 2020. Who knew?