Random bits of my so-called life.

It’s pretty hard to see even when you embiggen a couple times but there are snowflakes out there. On the first day of spring.

This is typical in the Great Lake State so ho-hum. Although I was really annoyed at myself for not putting on my glubs and balaclava to take the carts out for pickup tomorrow. It was frickin’ cold, not to mention that the wind blew a little paper Snag tights baggie out of my hands and I had to chase that around for a bit. I have too many tights so I have sworn off buying them for a while but I needed green and these were green and they don’t *always* have a green color I like. Emerald is my fave. These are not quiiiite emerald but they’ll do. Snag *always* has raspberry, which I LOVE.

Anyway, the temperature stayed in the mid to upper 30s today and there was no snow accumulation and we just have to wait it out. The eastern yooperland got pretty well slammed today. Pictures I saw from friends on facebook showed horrendous driving conditions, I can only guess verging on whiteouts depending on when or where. Also it looked like there was a lot of deep slush. I love the yoop but when someone once asked me if I wanted to move up there, my immediate answer was, “Seeya!” He hasn’t forgotten about that.

There is a place on the northbound I75 SUV Speedway just about at the Rudyard exit (in the yoop) where there is often a whiteout during a snow storm. I have survived that whiteout a few times in my life, most often in the crappiest, most rusted out Pinto wagon on earth. Years and years later, I was in the yoop when The Commander was sick. UKW flew out to say goodbye to The Comm (and support me). She landed in Traverse City and rented a modern “big girl” car like a Honda Accord or something to drive the three or so hours to Sault Ste. Siberia. There was snow and Accords are fantastic in snow, at least the one I once owned (we bought it new in 2001) was.

I had thought to warn UKW about the whiteout area but worried it would be too much information to add to her travel plans. She’s a good driver and I trusted she could deal with it. When she arrived, she *had* experienced that whiteout. I told her yes, it was an infamous place, and she said she had wondered if it was a known “thing”. Yes. It was known. She made it safely and us FinFam gals are a pretty intuitive bunch although certainly not to the point of telepathy or ESP 🤣

But today I got to participate in the “onboarding” of a new hire. A BA (business [systems] analyst), like meeee. Although my official job title changed a while back, I and others like me are still informally and lovingly referred to as BAs.

We do not do any kind of financial analysis. We are part of a development team and design web pages and other functionality for our *sprawling* application. And write detailed specifications for the development folks to “build”. The more “pictures” the better. Diagrams, tables, annotated screenshots, and whatever. I love my job although I *still* (after almost 18 years) sometimes suffer from “imposter syndrome”.

Until somewhere around 2018, I was part of a team of BAs. After a retirement and (sadly) a couple of layoffs, I was the *only* BA left. People were a bit skeptical that one person could handle the load. I knew that I could and I did. Truth be told, the workload had waned quite a bit by that time. It seems to be ramping up a bit now.

So. Is this person hired to replace me? Some skeptics want to know. Hopefully not in the short run but just as hopefully *so* in the longer run. I have a lot of “institutional” knowledge to impart and my useful (but often annoyingly) good memory knows where to *find* important specifications all the way back to 2005 (two years before I started working there). Based on my first impressions, I am looking forward to working with our new employee.

The pic has absolutely NOTHING to do with work. It surfaced in photo memories somewhere and represents the last time I had to clean my kitchen floor before the kitchen was gutted and totally renovated. It was today in 2014 and, in the process of whatever last-minute prep we were doing, I knocked the indoor compost container onto the floor. Geez. Do I really need to clean that up? Yes. Yes I do. One more time for this fugly linoleum flooring.

Y’know, there’s a bad apple in every bunch, roight? But This is about oranges, not apples, and I’ll start with Good Orange.

What did we ever do without iPhones? I took a photo of these kishu tangerines because they are only available at the Plum Market for a short period in the winter. They are gone now and I am buying regular “clementine/tangerines” or whatever they are. I am a U-scan Ninja and I know that there are some produce items that you can’t search for by their picture. Like kishu tangerines. So when I encounter them, I take a photo that includes the produce code and, when I get to “my” U-scan, I don’t have to ask for help.

Now to the Bad Orange. You know who. I try not to talk to the radio but last night I did. I don’t remember what Trump said or did but I ranted a bit even though me talking to the radio in my kitchen is not going to get the attention of Trump or anyone. Except for the guy in the next room.

So I don’t exactly remember what angered me but I was accused of “name-calling”. Name-calling Trump? Say what? If there is a person on earth who deserves to be name-called, it is Trump.

Two of the (many) things I do not like hate about Trump… 1) He name-calls anyone who publicly disagrees with him. “Sleepy Joe”, “Mr. Magoo”, “Ron Sanctimonious”, “Ditzy Devos”. Some of these people were and are (why?) still Trump supporters. There’s a whole wikipedia page about his nicknames. 2) He ridicules people he believes are “beneath” him. Like people with disabilities. Remember that reporter at one of his “rallies” pre-2016? I could go on and on but I won’t.

If I am alone in my kitchen talking to the radio, is it different than the president nastily shouting out insults during one of his stoopid MAGA rallies and fomenting his base? I think it is.

Is being polite a bad thing? MAPA? Make America Polite Again.

And let’s eat oranges.

A work thing I can talk about because it is relevant to employees at a lot of large companies “post” covid but doesn’t call my actual employer out.

An email came in with “RTO” in the subject. Yikes! The content was that every employee “assigned” to an office would be required to return to the office three days a week starting in April. APRIL??? Hmmm… What is the definition of “assigned”? Am I “assigned” to an office? Our Ann Arbor office closed early in the pandemic but the last time I knew, there was a Detroit office that showed up in Workday for us. Detroit is not a fun commute from here. I am not quiiiite ready to quit but I do not want to commute to Detroit EVER, let alone three days a week. Actually I don’t really want to commute ANYWHERE EVER AGAIN!

I wasn’t really panicked. I am an adult and I decided I would wait for more information and think the whole thing through. So. It turns out I am NOT assigned to an office. I am classified as a “remote” worker. The Detroit office closed years ago. So I still don’t have to commute anywhere and neither does my new/old boss.

I haven’t ever had a long commute to work. In fact, in my “childhood” job, I *walked* home every afternoon from the EPA motor vehicle emissions lab (five miles). Until the day “shooting pains” in my legs became an early announcement of the imminent arrival of my first beach urchin. After that, child care for a beautiful newborn girl changed my habits.

My “adult” job (the one I did today) required an eight-mile zen drive pre-pandemic. No freeway required. But many co-workers were permanent telecommuters all those years ago and it was always okay for anyone to telecommute for whatever reason. Usually snowstorms.

There are good things about commuting to an office for work. I have long complicated thoughts about this. I think there are good reasons for people to meet in person. Especially young folks who are just beginning their careers who need to network a bit. I just don’t think people should be required to be in-office just so the company can check a box. A pandemic is “over” box. Or a Trump box? I dunno.

The pic is from my mouse a few days ago. Floating/paddling down the Huron River.

Shelling pea season happens (on the Planet Ann Arbor) approximately the last couple weeks of June. Spelling bee season happens every day.

The first word puzzle I do every morning is the NYT Spelling Bee. About five days a week, I get to Queen Bee 👸🐝. I *always* get to genius, the level below Queen Bee. Once I get to genius, I open the “grid”, which tells me how many words start with each possible 2-letter combination (“la”, “so”, etc.) and the number of letters in each word starting with a letter. (Stop right now if this is hurting your brain. I’m doing a terrible job of explaining it.)

The grid often helps me get to Queen Bee without looking at the *comments* [long story deleted]. The only time I look at the comments is the next morning if I didn’t reach Queen Bee the day before. Sometimes I end up slapping my forehead with a big “duh”, as in why didn’t I get that one? Other times, there are obscure words. “Oppugn/Oppugning” is pretty obscure in my book and I sure didn’t get it a few days ago. “Popgun” I should’ve gotten.

Watch out for words like “nankeen”, “torii”, and “dugong” and I can’t think of any others right now. (That sentence contains a spoiler for today’s bee.) I do know “torii” because there is one at the Soo Locks park and I grew up with that particular torii.

The bee in the pic is from Wednesday. It is the 2,500th bee. It contains an SSSSSSSS. I have never seen an “S” in a spelling bee before and had to stare at it for a few minutes to process it. “S” is not usually included, I think mainly because of all the plural possibilities. On the other hand “ed” and “ing” endings are often included in the bee. Sometimes both of them. There were plurals in this puzz but all in all, it worked well.

I did get to Queen Bee with this unusual “s” letter group. I got there *almost* by myself. But. I did look at the comments. That was mainly because I was really astounded by the “s” and wanted to read what others thought. But the one word I didn’t have was “flus”, as in, there are a lot of “flus” going around (influenza viruses) and my eye picked up “flus” so I finished Queen Bee and reported it to my daughters with an “asterisk” (i.e., I peeked). I have my own opinions about the word “flus” (“strains of flu” maybe) but I guess it is a common enough usage to be included in the bee. On the other hand, I don’t like to think of “doggo” (another spoiler) as a real word but maybe I’m just being grouchy.

I was surfacing out of my last sleep this morning when I thought I heard thunder in the distance. Or was it just somebody rolling a garbage cart up their driveway? Maybe five minutes later, KABOOM! Okay it was thunder. I decided to wait until the storm rolled through before taking a shower.

We all make parenting mistakes and one of the ones my parents made was to make me afraid of a lot of things instead of teaching me how to do them safely. I think that since I (first child) was born 11 years after they were married, they were terrified that I might die and leave them childless again so they loaded me up with things not to do. I didn’t die. I didn’t have an interest in doing truly scary things. I am STILL nervous about lighting matches because I was constantly told how dangerous they were. Along those same lines was “don’t use water in the sink/bathroom/whatever during a lightning storm because you might get electrocuted.” I’m not sure that’s a serious issue in The Landfill but it still gives me pause. But I also know that lightning can do some very weird things.

Anyway, it turned out to be a mini-storm and rolled through quickly. Other parts of the country were not so lucky. About noon I was thinking about heating up my leftover fish from last night when a text came in from my lizard. Yes yes yes, I (we) will meet you at the Griz for lunch. Among other things, discussing our orders at the Griz brought up the term “North Atlantic Body” (or something like that).

My lizard is a pretty serious potter these days and these are some mugs she’s been working on. The blue represents a North Country Trail (NCT) blaze. If you don’t hike trails, a blaze is a (usually) rectangular patch of color painted on trees or sometimes buildings or whatever. We have NCT blazes on trees in our yard and if I get truly lost, I can always follow the blaze on the back of the GG’s jacket.

If you are familiar with web color codes, the NCT’s hexadecimal code is #5CA8D8. They have some other colors too. Scroll down to page 8 (if you are interested). I knew the NCT had a particular blue blaze color but I did not realize they had a hex code and an entire style guide.

Anyway, it was lovely to meet up with our daughter for lunch today. I am loving this new habit maybe more than the daughters want me to so I usually wait for one of them to initiate a plan. I do NOT want them to feel obligated to meet mom for lunch every weekend but I also do LOVE doing it now that I am not freaked out about covid.

P.S. I did not get “stuck” in the parking lot next to the Griz today. I’ve got that system down!

Say it in a sing song voice. Just that I am so sick to death with polly-tickle talk that when it reared it’s fugly head when we met our friends of porterization tonight, I immediately piped up with something like, “I have only one answer to any political discussions tonight: I didn’t vote for him.” (We’re a mixed group in terms of politics.)

Let’s talk farmers and tariffs for just a short minute. If I understand correctly, in Trump’s first term, he enacted tariffs that negatively affected some farmers. Yet some them VOTED for him AGAIN. And what is he doing? Again? An article I read today quoted some farmers saying how sorry they were that they voted for him. SO WHY THE F*CK *DID* YOU VOTE FOR HIM? Clearly he has only his own greedy interests in mind. I knew that. I have always known that. Why do so many other people NOT see that. Oh, the price of eggs is high. It must be Joe/Kamala’s fault. Trump will fix it. Jeebus. To be fair (although I don’t want to be fair), it isn’t Trump’s fault either. It is an EXTREMELY complicated issue that cannot be pinned on any president.

On a happier note, our temperatures hit the low 70s today. Dexter’s Pub was pretty slammed and it was their first day of the season to serve outdoor diners. The last time we ate there, I climbed over a small snowbank to get to the sidewalk. Dexter’s staff was a bit disheveled dealing with the logistics of outdoor diners but they handled it with aplomb and we were very happy with the service.

70 degrees in March on The Planet Ann Arbor? Not totally usual but not unusual either. March is a mixed bag. We have had years of big snowfalls and freezing temps every day. We have had ice storms. But then. The year The Commander died (2012), we had a long string of 80/90 degree days in March. The flowering trees all, um, flowered two months early. The Botanist harvested the last asparagus of his long life from his sprawling mini-farm and Farmer John brought some to Cubelandia from *his* mini-farm.

At the end of our evening, the conversation veered over into existential stuff and I had to bag it. No bandwidth for that this evening.

Love y’all, KW

WordPress used to email blahg comments directly to my inbox. It doesn’t any more and hasn’t for a few years. This means that if I want to reply to comments, I have to first go out to my blahg to see if there ARE any comments. If there are, I have to go to my iPhone’s spam folder and try to fish them out and move them to my inbox. From there, they automatically get ported over to my laptop so I can answer them with a regular QWERTY keyboard. I mean, I can certainly write emails on my iPhone and often do but if I want to make any kind of thoughtful response to something, I need the QWERTY on my laptop.

Wait, KW? Didn’t you learn typing in high school? Why not? Because I was on the “college track”. Remember that? Mac and Mike, my two male cousins who were three years older than me did take a summer typing class one year. I think I remember them being schlepped into town by Radical Betty or The White Tornado (their mooms, my aunts) while the rest of us burned black on the moominbeach, They were on the “college track” too so not sure why their mooms enrolled them in typing classes. But whatever.

I was actually fascinated with typewriters. We had one in the shabby little Superior Street bungalow I grew up in and my dad frequently used it to create treasury reports for the church. I got to play with it sometimes but it was mostly extreme hunt and peck.

So I didn’t learn how to type in high school. My fingers were busy with playing the flute and piano and I was good at those. Anyway. After college, I realized that I would probably have to learn to type PROPERLY to get a decent job… sigh… at the time, it seemed that a WOMAN could only do an administrative assistant type job if she wasn’t trained in a STEM type career. So I spent some time at the moomincabin one summer teaching myself how to type.

Skipping over some stuff, I somehow landed a job as a government contractor. Being a STEM type job, my job description didn’t require typing skills. But guess what? Typing skills were important to my success in that long ago “childhood” career and it has also been important in my “adult” career and everything I’ve done in between. I’m not sure that typing will always be a useful skill (thinking AI and SIRI type stuff here). I’m not sure what to think going forward but I think it’ll be a while before QWERTY keyboards go away.

Thinking *back*, we had a computer lab teacher over at Haisley elementary when the beach urchins were there. She actually taught TYPING! Some parents were annoyed about that. “My kid is gonna be a neurosurgeon or nuclear engineer.” Yada yada. They don’t need to learn to type. Oh, c’mon. Yes they do.

I have been a full-time telecommuter for five years now. You know why. March 12 was a Thursday that year. Over at the office, we hadn’t been ordered to relocate to home yet but there was a lot of talk about whether to come in to the office the next morning. People were nervously “happy birthday” washing their hands and Clorox wiping down communications equipment in conference rooms.

I stopped at the liqwaaaar store on the way home. When I *got* home, I had a text from Amazon Woman saying not to come in to the office the next day. Our team made a smooth transition. We had all been able to work from home forever. Some people had been full-time telecommuters for years and we have co-workers in India. And we are a “mature” team. So we all just jumped online as usual, just that nobody was congregated in a conference room.

By July, the company announced our building would be closed. I read that message while telecommuting from the moomincabin deck. Our office building had always been underutilized and I guess the company figgered why pay rent? I returned to the office three times after that. Once within a couple weeks for I fergit what. Maybe to retrieve whatever “essentials” I had left there? Once to drop off an old sewing musheen to be hauled somewhere Building Mom had arranged for stuff from the building and anything else anybody had hanging around in their dungeon to be dropped off. And once to do a final clean out. I put virtually everything that had any potential “value” to anyone into the “garage sale” on the tables in the lunchroom and trashed the rest. I did NOT keep much in my cube but Brooosie had given me a few of his thrift shop finds over the years.

The photo is one I took at the Saline Road Meijer seven days earlier. I can’t remember if I bought any cleaning wipes that day or not. I suspect not. I didn’t panic-buy toilet paper either. My mouse was a grocery worker and I knew if we needed something, she would be able to watch for deliveries and snatch some for us. I made a couple other mini grock runs after this. For the first time in my life I wiped down my grocery cart with disinfectant. No masks for most of us unwashed masses. Then my mouse became my main shopper and deliverer for a while until stores got it together to do contact free pickup. Small local businesses were the first to figure it out. Sparrow (meat/grocks), seafood market, liqwire store.

I was a covid coward for longer than most people but I am pretty cavalier about it now. But unlike a lot of other people I do not pooh-pooh it. We need to remember that covid killed a lot of people and although it maybe favored the “elderly” and some other vulnerable groups, others died too. A bit randomly like the polio epidemics I heard about growing up but don’t remember (not alive/born yet and then too young). (I do know that polio is a totally different virus.)

And guess what? Covid isn’t over yet. A co-worker is recovering from it as I write this. She’s fine but it’s her first case and she is vaxxed (and vaxxed and vaxxed and vaxxed). Seems like we still don’t know exactly how this virus works…

I spent the whole day replaying a work meeting recording. Bit by bit. With many stops to replay little bits of things, sometimes multiple times, and taking notes in a word document. Like, whut are we talking about. As an example, one person got to the very end of a sentence and… I was waiting with bated breath for the last and most important word in the sentence. Alas, another person interrupted them before they could utter that last word. The conversation immediately veered off in another direction and I never got my answer.

This was *not* a contentious meeting. People were just caught up in the moment. Alas, I got left behind🤪 It’ll get sorted out. I am probably the only person at the meeting that replays the recording and I will keep doing it until I understand enough to have some coherent questions. That’s my job, business systems analyst (although they call me something with “engineer” in the title now). Believe it or not, my job involves anthropology, even though I have *never* studied that subject and certainly don’t view myself as expert in any way. But I *think* that was part of what I was working with today.

You know the “fintech” industry, right? Online banking and more, right? I describe myself on my social media profile pages as “Fintech pro masquerading as a vagabond”. Originally it was “IT pro masquerading as a vagabond”. When my original boss the LSCHP found me on Twitter (it *was* Twitter then), he told me he wished he had thought of that. BTW, it wasn’t scary that he looked for me on Twitter. But I’ll tell that story some other day. The synopsis is, “I was on vacation and my boss created a Twitter account to tweet me totally outta the blue.” 🤣

At some time quiiiite a while back, I decided to change my Facebook profile from “IT pro…” to “Fintech pro…”. OMG. People thought it was related to my last name (“Finlayson”). People thought it was because I was Finnish. I am not Finnish but people sometimes think I am because my last name begins with “Fin” and I have once-blonde hair. What the heck would “Finnish technology” mean anyway. Fancy saunas maybe?

The odd thing is that the term “fintech” has been around for a long time and I have been aware of it via corporate stuff. All of a sudden I am hearing it in the news (radio/internet) ALL THE TIME! Is this a new thing or have I been deaf to it for all these years?

In (one of) his North Country Trail (NCT) hats.

The GG has come across a wonderful opportunity to hike in the Adirondacks with our friend Joan this summer. I don’t know exactly what their mission is but apparently it has something to do with mapping (re-mapping?) some of the existing NCT trail system. The existing trail maps are not very good (or complete?) and they are working together to try to sort them out. I’m not exactly sure what’s wrong with them and am not trying too hard to learn but there he is working with little “stickies” and other tools.

We had the great pleasure of Joan’s company for a while today. Joan has hiked the entire NCT (4800 or so miles from N. Dakota to Vermont) twice. She did not do this from end to end either time but by carefully planning segments she could get to between other obligations. The GG hiked with her and helped support her during her second trip and they became great friends. She is a NCT celebrity in any case.

She was traveling from somewhere to her home in Michigan and we were on her way there so she paid us a visit. They were into the maps almost as soon as she walked in the door. They then packed the maps up to hike downtown for breakfast (and look for more maps at Bivouac, an outfitter downtown).

When they returned, they got the maps out again and much more conversation ensued. This was all very interesting to me although I only understood what they were talking about at a VERY high level. In some ways it isn’t all that different than what I do for a living.

The GG has hiked in the Adirondacks a bit. Joan knows the area very well. I greatly enjoyed half-listening to their conversation (I was supposedly working). Joan is one of the most intelligent people I have ever met and I hope I am not insulting her to say that she has a memory a lot like mine. Which is to say very good.

That’s our Landfill “dining” area in the pic, front door and front side window. I dunno if it looks like there is snow on the ground but there is not. All snow is melted and all the (f*cking) ice is gone (again) and Mr. Golden Sun is making everything look a little white in the late afternoon. The bookshelf holds nature books and most of my cookbook collection. Cookbooks I have bought or been gifted and The Commander’s collection (from her *house*, not the moomincabin, if any nefarious folks are lurking 🤪). I don’t use the cookbooks a lot but I also don’t feel like getting rid of them. There are a few recipes that I still pull out from time to time if I haven’t entered them into Plan-to-Eat. And then there are those that are firmly in my head, like the Vegetarian Epicure’s eggplant parm.

One of the reasons the GG probably got along with the rusticity of the moomincabin when we first met was that the cFam had its own rustic cabin (they still have it but it isn’t rustic any more).

When I first knew the GG, I was hanging out with a bunch of our work friends and it was winter and there were some plans to visit his family’s cabin at Houghton Lake for a weekend of skiing, etc. I was welcome to join but at that age I was skeptical. People were always dreaming up these wild plans for all their friends to go to somebody’s cabin or wherever and for whatever reason, they always fell apart. I didn’t have much faith in the human race (particularly boyz) at that time although I’m sure I also bagged out of things too.

To my great surprise, the GG was totally into the trip to his family’s cabin (and his parents didn’t care) and we did in fact travel there! I drove my little Ford Fiesta with the GG in the passenger seat and I fergit who else. Bruce and an old friend from Zephron 3 maybe. Mark and Pooh might’ve been in their own car? Anyway. Indoor plumbing or not, the trip was so successful a bigger group of us repeated it a few weeks later. This time, I met some of his siblings. The other half of the Twinz of Terror and their younger brother Jim, and their little sister The Beautiful Suzie. Actually at one point during the weekend, Suzie had been relegated to the back seat of their dad’s big sedan, which the GG drove on that trip. Suze was a bit jealous that I was in the front, since she had ridden in that seat with my her big brother many times.

Suzie and I got to be bosom buddies (I miss her so much now that she’s gone) and meeting some of the GG’s sibs that weekend kinda made me think maybe he wasn’t just stringing me along. I was meeting some of his family, right? And they’re meeting me? The next time I went to Houghton Lake with the GG, we traveled alone. And the rest is history, right?

So, what would you think if you rented an Airbnb and were confronted with this bathroom? This picture was taken in the winter. We could use the cFam toilet in the winter but only by pumping a bunch of buckets full of water to flush it. We heated water from the pump in big kettles on the electric stove to wash dishes and fill the bag shower I eventually obtained from REI (because I can’t stand to be dirty). There was full running hot water everywhere in the summer. Sometimes in the warmer months, there would be a frog in the shower with you.

I guess my point might be that I stumbled upon someone who had similar life experiences as I did. A rustic cabin on a lake and beloved family members.

The Houghton Lake cabin is more or less halfway between The Planet Ann Arbor / Detroit Metro area and the moomincabin. Houghton Lake is the largest inland lake in the Great Lake State. It is not as exotically scenic as Lake Superior but it is beautiful in its own way and it is much more friendly to pontoon botes, etc. Wanna go to the tiki bar? Yes! Very few tiki bars on most of Gitchee Gumee.

The first two photoooos popped up in memories today. The first is the GG’s Lyme Lounge encampment at the moomincabin last March (moomincabin in the background). Note that most years, it is impossible to camp at the moomincabin at this time of year. You’ll see why by the end of this post.

My cousin Grinch had parked Radical Betty’s (his late mom) car behind the moomingarage. The GG was a bit discombobulated by this but I cracked up. I remember when that car was new. Now it’s probably full of drywall dust and other detritus. I love my cousin *anyway* and I don’t care if he parks a car there when we aren’t around.

The GG left his camping spot the next day and by then a dusting of snow had come down. Straight behind the Lyme Lounge is the path to the beach.

This last pic was taken TODAY by my cousin Judd who lives year-round next door. This is the same place as the first pic except the moomincabin is *behind* the photographer so you’re looking at the Old Cabin.

This snowbank forms ALMOST every winter, last winter being a very unusual exception. To its right is our path to the beach, I dunno maybe 100 yards long or less. Gitchee Gumee makes a wind tunnel out of that path (lined by tall red pines, etc.) to form this snowbank, which is probably taller than I am. This is our “parking lot” and we don’t arrange to have it plowed because we aren’t THERE in the winter. Last I knew, one of my cousins plows the (two-track) road behind the cabins and he does *not* need to plow this!

So. Two years ago in APRIL, the GG was planning a trip to Tahquamenon. He rather nonchalantly said, “I think I will camp in the moomincabin parking lot.” This totally cracked me up. He has been going to the moomincabin for a very long time (since he started hanging out with meeee) and he should know better than that. I said, “I do not think you are going to be camping in the moomincabin parking lot this weekend.” Why not, he wanted to know. Within an hour or so, totally coincidentally, my cousin Judd sent me an almost identical pic to the one he sent today. Well. *This* is why you are not going to be camping there this weekend 🤪 The GG is in the yooperland *this* weekend but he is *not* camping and he is nowhere near Gitchee Gumee.

P.S. I can’t end this without expressing how lucky I am that I married a guy who actually enjoyed schlepping up and down the I75 SUV Speedway to stay in a small rustic cabin with his wife and in-laws. We still had an *outhouse* back then and the only indoor plumbing was cold running water to the kitchen sink via a garden hose from my uncle’s well next door. Not every spouse would be a happy participant in that. But he embraced the whole thing 🧡

I spent most of my day figuring out how to write about old SWIFT to new SWIFT. SWIFT is a protocol for sending financial transaction data to foreign countries. Plus a lot of coding to update our high fidelity prototype to reflect some of the changes. Really you don’t want to know.

Somebody once asked me if coding html, etc., was stressful for me. No, no, no it’s not. I love when I have a lot of html coding to do. It is a “zen” activity for me and frees my brain to work on other stuff I need to do but need “brain breaks” to accomplish. When I was young I used to sometimes practice my flute while watching TV or reading The New Yorker… Human brains are a lot more complicated than AI…

A nice mid-day interruption to my day was meeting my mouse and raccoon over at the Session Room for lunch. I am enjoying being beyond covid enough that I don’t fear entering restaurants any more. I know it sounds stupid, especially since when I *did* get *covid*, I wasn’t sick. But still, it took me a while. For a long time, I would go out to eat and while I wasn’t freaked about covid, I was exhausted afterwards. Not so much any more.

The hairstyle in the pic? I woulda *loved* that hairstyle when I was in junior high. You might be able to see that there is hair (MY HAIR) in the southeast corner of the pic. Of course it isn’t an actual hairstyle. It is an accidental pic of various indoor and outdoor LED lights that my phone duplicated in weird but wonderful ways.

Whem the beach urchins were young, they dyed their hair purple and whatever. Once I asked them to make me a purple streak in my hair. Alas, with my bushy hair, it looked like a blotch.

Via bloggy friend Pam, I learned that Trump was ranting and raving at his “State of the Union” speech about transGENDER mice. He was confusing transGENDER mice with transGENIC mice. Alas, a lot of MAGAts didn’t notice (or know) the difference and parts of the internet went a little wild complaining about the government spending gazillions of dollars to study transGENDER mice. Of course other parts of the internet went wild with memes mocking the orange baboon’s idiocy.

After I picked myself up off the floor from laughing, I remembered a story (or really a double story) from back in the days of yore when me and my cousins, etc. were young adults. As for the laughing, it was funny on the surface but it’s scary that so many people in our country are so misinformed that they are taking the orange idiot at his word even when he doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about.

Anyway, story(ies).

First, my cousin Uber Kayak Woman was visiting her parents a couple doors down the moominbeach from us in the yooperland and we went out to the “Al*phaaaa*” Bar with other cousins and various friends. She and someone else at our table were having an animated conversation about recombinant DNA. A guy who wanted to flirt with her was dogging her by asking “What are you talking about?” over and over again. Not being interested in flirting, she ignored him for a bit but finally turned around, looked him in the eye and said, “Recombinant DNA!” I don’t remember if he replied to that or not but I think he sorta slunk away.

Fast forward a year or so. I was at a MooU barroooom with my BFF Sam (archaeologist, not dog). Were we in “Drooley’s”? I dunno. We were talking about the DNA conversation at the Al*phaaa* when we noticed a big galoot heading our way. Oh noooo. Is he gonna ask if he can sit with us? Well, no. He didn’t ask. He just SAT DOWN. And asked, “What are you talking about?” Me and Sam looked wide-eyed at each other for a split second or so and then said, “Deoxyribonucleic acid!” In unison, no less, one syllable at a time.

The galoot’s response? “Oh. I haven’t done any of that in a while.” Those were the days…

BTW: The Alpha used to be a kind of a dive bar albeit very popular with returning college students and Canadians as well as locals. They have renovated it in recent years and they even have a menu now although they cart the food over from Zorba’s, the restaurant next door (owner of both is Greek, food is good). I do hope they’ve renovated the bathrooms. We’ll talk about those some other day. Or not.

Disclaimer: I am not well versed in either recombinant DNA or transgenic mice but I have enough scientific vocabulary to know transGENIC and transGENDER are different things.

Finally, I literally found Frooogy’s Harry Potter glasses on the moominbeach. Beachcombing at its best.

I guess there are people who make money by “blahgging” on whatever platform they use. “Traditional” blahgs like this one, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, whatever.

Oops. Interrupting to report an incident of marital discord over whether Trump knows the definition of “hubris”. I wasn’t exactly listening closely to the radio but it sounded like he had used that word. I’m not sure in what context. I know I shouldn’t denigrate his intelligence because somehow he has this stranglehold over all of the folks who weren’t born with built in Bullshit Detectors. So he must have some intelligence. But why does he say and do so many things I think are stoopid? THEY’RE EATING THE PETS being one of the things at the top of my list. Maybe “Musked” federal employees can eat people’s pets if they can’t afford regular groceries? I dunno. In full disclosure, *I* have looked up the word “hubris” a few times over the years.

Aaaaanddd… I have totally lost my train of thought after watching whatever episode we are on in Silo season two. I can’t board that train again but I have *never* expected or wanted to monetize my blahg. It’s all about meeeee emptying my brain of whatever detritus happens to be in there that needs to get outta town. Higgledy-piggledy or not and whether or not anyone else cares.

I don’t have much else tonight but I will just say it is soooo nice to have my “old” boss back. And, oh yeah, that pic is a light bulb campfire in our symposium booth last weekend.

So what did you expect “your favorite president” Trump to do? His first day in office… Mass deportation? Bring down grocery prices? Something bizarre about women and how they would love him? Cue up norovirus symptoms 🤮🤮🤮

Have any of those things happened? I don’t really pay too much attention to grocery prices but I know how important they are because “been there done that”. It is only through very hard work by me and the GG and some amazing bits of luck that allow me to be nonchalant when buying groceries. If anything, I want to pay it forward, like if the young hippie-looking guy in front of me in line has an out-of-state food card that doesn’t work, I will swipe my card to pay for his food. But I’m not sure Trump has done anything about lowering prices. I actually don’t expect presidents to have much effect on prices but he LOUDLY promised that and I think a bunch of low information voters without Bullshit Detectors believed him.

Immigration? I haven’t heard anything about his efforts in that endeavor but I haven’t been paying a whole lot of attention. For the record, I am *for* immigration. I come from immigrants as most of my readers also do. I think that there have to be rules about becoming a US citizen (and there ARE) but these folks are *people* and some of them are trying to escape horrible circumstances in their home countries. Fix the process so they can come in. They are not all “bad hombres”. A lot of them are moms with babies.

So those are a couple of things that got Trump elected. What is he doing? Jeebus. How many government workers have been “musked”? How many of those fired government workers voted for the asshole in chief. Did they realize that his “method” for lowering prices would be chainsawing their jobs? And that he would empower a crazy (yes, crazy) billionaire to execute his “plan”? A man who, while slashing the jobs that people depend upon to buy groceries and pay their mortgages (and by doing that boost their local economy), ridicules them on his X platform.

Federal workers are people. Yes really. With families and mortgages and grocery bills. There are always some deadbeats in every organization but largely, federal workers are dedicated to their jobs and also want to reduce “fraud waste and abuse”.

Oh yeah. the pic is from last Wednesday when great big snow clumps came down for a while. It’s warmer now and our back yard is flooded.

Another Lansing area establishment that has been around forever. This one is in *East* Lansing, the city to the (duh) east of Lansing, our state capital. East Lansing is the home of the sprawling MooU (Michigan State University) campus.

Both the GG and I went to college there. We did not know each other then although later on when he worked with my cousin on The Planet Ann Arbor (where we *did* meet), he thought he remembered seeing *her* there in a class or whatever. He also once told me he thought he saw *meeee* (with my cousin) in Lizard’s Underground. Lizard’s was a bar/music venue next door to Beggar’s and in the basement, under what business no one can remember and the google has not been helpful.

I’m not actually sure if the GG saw me there or not. Another part of this maybe-myth was that his brother Don (not his twin) may have been trying to flirt with me in Lizard’s? I don’t remember any of this (so maybe it didn’t happen) but back in those days boyz were always flirting with me. I was *really* good at going along with it all. Until I didn’t🐲 Meaning if his brother HAD been flirting with me, I would not have fallen for his crap. I was born with a highly sensitive Bullshit Detector that has kept me out of all kinds of potential trouble in my life and he would have pushed all of those buttons.

I say that last because of *course* I eventually met the GG’s brother Don by actual introduction (this is my girlfriend). I swear, Don flirted with me even after I married the GG. Depending on the circumstances, I would roll my eyes, giggle or ignore. Thinking through clenched teeth, “I’m married to your brother”. He still pushed my BS Detector buttons but I grew to love him (as a brother-in-law of course). We were pretty good buddies by the time he died (too young), and I wonder what he would be like now if he were alive. Probably still flirting with girls but probably not with baggy old me🤣

I started this post thinking I would write about Beggar’s Banquet but I somehow slid over to something else. We eat at Beggar’s every year the Friday night before the Quiet Adventure Symposium. It’s always during the MooU spring break so it is easy to just walk in and get a table on a Friday night.

My Bullshit Detector is why I am not a Donald J. Trump supporter. Y’all MAGAts should get one too🐽💩🤪

Usually it’s my daughter who alerts me. “Blahg entry moom?” But she knew we were out of town and likely carousing around with friends. And we were but that was waaaaay earlier in the evening.

Anyway, I was writing a blahg entry last night and it was waaaaay too quiet in our hotel room. I’m not a big TV watcher but I asked the GG to try to find something on TV that wasn’t too obnoxious. He flipped around a bit and we ended up with a “reality” show channel. That is, reality shows like the old show “Cops” (Bad boys bad boys whatcha gonna do?), not the kind like “Naked and Afraid”. This channel was perfect for my purposes because I could tune in and out. (To be honest, Naked and Afraid has sucked me in before too.)

I was going through my usual endless cycle of edit/tweak, “Save Draft”, “Preview”, repeat with my blahg, when a show came on about modern gold prospectors in Greenland and that one sorta sucked me in. At least more than the one where they were salvaging an old ice cream truck from under 40 feet of water in a quarry, although that was pretty interesting too once you figured out that there were no people in the truck when it went over the edge.

In the end, I forgot to hit “Publish”. Note that there are days I miss posting for technical reasons but they are few and far between. Even if I’m vomiting up a norovirus, I can usually manage to squeak out, “communing with Eco-terlet, back later” or whatever. TMI?

We took a leisurely drive home on the back roads this morning and I didn’t look at my blahg like I often do in the morning. When we got home, I went to the grocery store, which was slammed like I knew it would be at noon on a Sunday. It was so slammed I couldn’t even use my own personal U-scan musheen🐲 Eventually I saw a comment on *Friday’s* entry wondering where *yesterday’s* was and, sure enough, it wasn’t there. So thanks bloggy friend Pam!🤣

I also have not listened to or looked at news since Friday afternoon. We got into Mooon Yooonit this morning and I wanted Willie’s Roadhouse or something but I couldn’t make satty-lite radio work well enough to find it. I didn’t really want NPR news so I just left the radio off. I should know how to work the radio in Moooon Yooonit but I don’t drive her very often, mostly because there’s always a lot of crapola in her, including a big plastic skeleton that sits in the passenger seat. With light-up eyes and a MAGA hat🤪 And yes, he is seat-belted in.

Finally, the pics are of Dagwood’s, a popular Lansing bar that’s on our way into town when we’re heading to the annual symposium. I doubt they have changed the decor significantly since 1947 (except for all the TVs and stuff) but that’s part of what we like about it. And the food (which is “bar food”) is great and the servers are tops! Just before I took the picture of the sign, I had walked out the door and down the steps and I had to grab onto a nearby brick half-wall (to the left out of frame) because a big gust of wind barreled down Kalamazoo Street and tried to knock me off balance.

The last time I was in this room (a small auditorium) in early March 2020, social distancing wasn’t quiiiiite a thing yet but it was on the horizon. I was “happy birthday washing” my hands every time I used the water closet but NOBODY was wearing a mask and I’m pretty sure the social distancing thingy was not there.

I sat in the very front of this room that day to watch a presentation and a guy sat down RIGHT next to me and even edged his chair over closer to mine. I’d’ve been TOTALLY freaked out except a woman was with him (his wife?). He then asked me if *I* was the presenter. Um, nope. Thankfully he inexplicably and unceremoniously LEFT moments after the presentation began. It kinda reminded me of the time a guy approached me at Kroger to ask if I was a “lady minister”.

I attended the symposium last year but didn’t attend any presentations. Still a bit covid averse. Today I attended three. A man who kayaked along the coast of Maine with its many islands. A very entertaining 84-year-old man presenting a wild slide show of his life, mainly focusing on his many canoe trips. All over the world, many in the arctic or far north. They were both wonderful but my favorite was probably the last one of the day, a quieter one about the ebb and flow of the moose and wolf populations on Isle Royale in Lake Superior. I won’t try to repeat all the details but decades of research provided detailed population data and explained the sometimes surprising reasons for population changes. It was a *fascinating* look inside some very complicated science presented in a way that a baggy old kayak woman could understand.

Saturday of the symposium is a long day for me. We and several other North Country Trail chapters run a booth together. I am not a schmoozer and talking to random people about the trail exhausts me, especially the (thankfully few) “wise guys”. I do enjoy talking to our own trail folks and got closer to a few of those I didn’t know well today. A highlight was discovering that one of the guys (and his family) spent some time living on The Planet Ann Arbor and some of his kids attended the beach urchins’ elementary school. His kids are much younger than ours so we didn’t cross paths at the school but small world.

Dinner for 20 at Pizza House at the end of the day and now back at our fancy hotel suite for some downtime. The regular rooms are fancy enough but we were upgraded for some unknown reason.