Random bits of my so-called life.

So, on No Politics Day (NPD), I actually didn’t listen to a lot of political news. I did veer in the direction of politics when I mentioned one of my fave causes, Planned Parenthood, but that threatened to escalate and that’s all I will say about that except we shut that discussion down PDQ.

I prefer going out to lunch (over dinner) on NPD. I do like having a Landfill dinner on NPD. So we did lunch with some beach urchins at Casey’s Tavern today. We’re being porterized tonight at the Landfill (Chinese, the food, not the Porters), and tomorrow night we’ll have a family Landfill dinner. If I were still working, I would’ve taken today off and since MLK Day is Monday, it’d be a 4-day weekend. But whatever.

I was spotted at Casey’s because of my tie-dyed skirt by a man with a tie-dyed t-shirt. I *think* we have encountered this couple in Casey’s before. The wife is in a wheelchair. This was a good encounter.

We porterized ourselves tonight with Chinese takeout. I was happy with that and there was a fake log faaaar in the faaaarplace. We are on a different “clock” than our friends of porterization but they are now on their way home to watch whatever TV shows they want until whenever they want to watch them and I am gonna crash out.

P.S. I did snow driving today and I was a champ. Regained some of the driving confidence covid took away from me.

Little Cat Z always sends me flowers on No Politics Day. This year, she sent them a day early because a lunch date on No Politics Day meant we couldn’t guarantee that anyone would be here to accept the delivery and it is frigid out there. I don’t think it got to 20 degrees but I could be wrong. And I think it might be colder tomorrow. A lovely young woman called to make sure I (or someone) would be home before delivering them. The vase was The Commander’s. It’s a bit bigger than it looks in the pic and it is HEAVY!!!

One of the first years of the No Politics Day flower tradition, we were out when the flowers arrived. We had covid and no we were not out at a restaurant, we were driving around the countryside because cabin f*cking fever. (We were not very sick but no way would we pay covid forward!) The flowers got delivered to my uber nice next door neighbors’ house and when the husband brought them around, I gave my neighbor a status update and told him to leave them on the porch and I would grab them when he was a safe distance from my virus.

My main excursion today was the Plum Market. I know, so exciting, especially since I’m usually there every other day. I was trying to make marinade for filets and didn’t have any oil besides olive oil (which I have in spades…) Olive oil doesn’t (to me anyway) go well with tamari and brown sugar and friends so I got canola. Oh, and we were flat out of dry vermouth. So I made a mini-run. As I was heading toward the door, I heard a growl behind me. Oh, don’t worry, it was a familiar growl, i.e., the GG. What the heck was HEEEEE doing in the Plum. He coerced me into a trip to Tractor Supply on the way home (he had been out walking). Tractor Supply was not actually on the way home but it was a sunny day and the roads weren’t toooo messy. So.

Happy No Politics Day to the mean old grunchie old grinchie and Our Northern Correspondent, who celebrate that holiday today, sharing it with Martin Luther King.

P.S. A little pack of Bon Bon Bon chocolates came with the flowers. They are so good and if you order them online, you get a tote bag that I think is also a cooler? I was like, oh no, another bag but the GG uses his (from Valentine’s last year) even though the colors are kinda girly and he is a “manly man” LOL, think chainsaw guy. And it’s a Detroit business.

Yeah, maybe. For many years, we shoveled our snow the old fashioned way. I did most of it for most of those years. Even the snow cement the plows left at the bottom of the driveway.

At some point in time, the GG asked for a yooperland style snowblower for xmas. By that time I was working full time at Cubelandia and he was retaaared and I bought this thing for him and I don’t really do snow shoveling any more. Today we got kind of a lot of snow and he was like, “I can’t wait to run my snowblower.” So that’s what he’s doing and NOW he is putting vee-hickles out in the street so he can blow the driveway. I have to say I am a fan.

I am not looking forward to the next freeze and thaw cycle.

Canya tell by the title what I was doing today? That’s right, I was cleaning out the refrigimitator. I am not finished yet. This seems to be a multi-day project this time. Partly because I wash all the shelves with soapy water and let them totally dry out before I put them back in.

But oh dear, it looked like the refrigerator door was even more full of condiments and stuff than it usually is and yes, yes, yes it was. Why? Well, for one thing, there were three partially full bottles of Sriracha and two partially full bottles of yellow mustard plus another mostly full one. I was able to “combind” the three partial srirachas into one and two of the yellow mustards into one.

People, that’s as far as I got, at least for today. I cannot keep up with this stuff. I don’t use sriracha at all. I rarely use yellow mustard. And there are a whole bunch of fancy mustards in there that I haven’t even looked at yet.

My day was interrupted (happily enough) by the GG calling from Dexter asking for a pickup. We decided that involved lunch at Dexter’s Pub. It was mid-afternoon already, which is a good time to go out to lunch because the bar was empty and there was plenty of parking. But after that, I was toast in terms of refrigerator cleaning and “combinding” of condiments. It’s okay, I will continue my slog again tomorrow.

“Combind/combinded/combinding”? This originates from a pretty funny story. For a long time the Twinz of Terror were regular blood donors. The GG lived here (with me) on the Planet Ann Arbor. The UU lived an hour or so away. At one point, their records got mixed up somehow. When they tried to straighten them out, the woman they were dealing with said something like, “Oh the records got combinded!” Combinded? Okay, we get it. She supposedly straightened that out but… Then… They got “combinded” again. I mean, they are ID twins but they have different names and lived/live in very different locations.

And the weird tower is somewhere near Milan – the Michigan Milan, which is pronounced with a long i, as opposed to the Italian Milan. I couldn’t do much to prettify this fugly picture but I figgered it was better than the inside of my refrigerator.

Yes, that Flint. (The pic is not from Flint. It’s from yesterday’s ICE protest in Saline.) But, yes, that Flint. The one where Michigan’s “leaders” poisoned people with crappy water from the Flint River. Flint’s population is about 80K. That’s apparently up from recent years. I’m not sure why I am suddenly obsessed with populations. When I was a kid traveling down to Ann Arbor and DayTwa from the yooperland in the back seat of my parents’ car, I always thought Flint was a bigger city than the Planet Ann Arbor. And maybe it was. Over the years, A-squared (as we like to call Ann Arbor) has grown a LOT and I think Flint has shrunk. Our populations have very different characteristics.

On those childhood trips, I would spend a lot of time in the back seat looking at the Michigan road map and following our progress. I *think* it listed at least some populations. There was a distance, hmmm, what do I call it? It was a graphic representation of how far apart many Michigan cities were. After years of writing functional specifications and designing informational graphics, I think it’s one small reason why I was good at making informational graphics. Okay, ’nuff navel gazin’ KW.

So FlaMan lives in Flint and he doesn’t drive so we (and other siblings) supply him with food, supplies, and pretty much anything he wants. I don’t exactly know how to describe FlaMan but he has some interesting wants. Light bulb cameras are a recent one. We’ll talk about the nose hair trimmer some other day. Or not. I am a HUGE fan of FlaMan and support pretty much whatever he wants as long as it doesn’t involve a telemarketer or bank fraud…

It is difficult to visit FlaMan because it’s an hour away on the freeway and when you get there, Gunsmoke reruns are on, both in the living room and his bedroom, where he usually is. But I asked the GG, “Can we take Argentine Road home?” The answer was yes (as I knew it would be) and so I accompanied him. I didn’t spend a lot of time with FlaMan, who was in the bedroom the whole time and the GG turned down Gunsmoke in the living room so I could hear myself think.

Argentine Road is a little (but paved) road and I know about it because there is a girl scout camp along it where I went for weekend trips quite a few times with a couple troops. We always had a lot of moms on those trips and once we got caught with STRICTLY VERBOTEN whine. We were not caught by a camp official. We were caught by the extremely religious mom around the corner (who was with our group) and guess what? As we were packing up to go, she giggled, “Somebody left their Chardonnay in the refrigerator.”

Or should it be ICE ICE Barbie?

As we are often wont to do, we took a drive in the country today. The Planet Ann Arbor is a medium(?) sized city (population 122K) in southeast Michigan. It has a LOT of traffic and a bazillion traffic lights. It is *not* a Detroit suburb and from our neighborhood on the western edge, it doesn’t take much time to get OUTTA town. I mean to empty tertiary highways and dirt roads. We went south today.

Because we were going south, we drove through the much smaller city of Saline (population 9K). Like Ann Arbor, Saline is not a suburb of anything. If I were to associate it with Ann Arbor, I would probably call it a “satellite” city. It is close enough to Ann Arbor that many people who live there enjoy a short commute to Ann Arbor.

So, we were approaching Saline and when we got to the main intersection, I was amazed at how many people were out there protesting ICE! I was not really aware of protests but this was a MOB. And I mean a FRIENDLY mob. I couldn’t get my phone out of my pocket fast enough our first time through the intersection so I asked the GG to go around the block and he obliged.

From Cygnus, even though I wasn’t driving, I could not get a photo that captured the numbers of people at that intersection. But as luck would have it, the light was red and I got a few pics. A couple people noticed my phone and must have ascertained that I was friendly (I was waving) because they pushed their signs out in front of Cygnus so I could get pics. In the end, this was my fave with the “peach” (derierre) and orange haired poop. “ICE storms are deadly” is also good. Because yes they certainly are although the usual meaning in the Great White North is a bit different than what happened last week in Minneapolis.

The GG noticed that it was an older crowd. I was like, so what? I’m not sure what he was trying to say and I’m not sure what to say next. Well, except this. I hesitate to say that Trump/MAGA are fascists exactly because I think they are their own damn cult and I feel like this is a little different than the Nazis. But. My dad served in WWII (as a pilot instructor, he never saw action – hey, somebody has to teach kids how to fly planes. Why not a slightly older kid?). A lot of these “older” protesters probably had parents/grandparents who also served in that war. They’ve heard about this kind of stuff and don’t want ICE thugs coming into their neighborhoods to terrorize people, not to mention shoot them dead. I don’t really know why the crowd skewed older but I’m glad they were out there.

Democracy is as messy as all get out but authoritarian rule (fascist, communist or whatever) is much much much worse. What’s going on right now is too scary.

First, I dunno if the GG will read my blahg today. He doesn’t always. I don’t think he can keep up with me. Hell, *I* can’t even keep up with me. But I’m taking a risk writing about the mini-win I had on Thursday. We are in a “mixed” marriage. MAGA vs. sanity. My viewpoint at least.

Make no mistake, the GG is a wonderful guy in all other ways. He helped me take care of my mother when she was dying and all that goes with that. After she died, he organized and trailered all of the physical objects that needed to be moved somewhere to wherever they needed to go. I was working full-tilt-boogie. He is also a wonderful father. Born in the middle of 10 siblings, he had been changing diapers for umpteen bazillion years when Little Cat Z was born. I had NEVER changed a diaper and I that continued for another couple weeks as I recovered from, uh, a rather massive amount of stitches.

Preamble outta the way. We had multiple *polite* conversations throughout Thursday about the horrendous Minnesota ICE shooting. MAGA talking points about “domestic terrorist” came through. I looked at those videos too. What I saw was it seemed like split seconds before the ICE guy (’cause I don’t think he’s a real cop) left his car, ordered Renee out of her car and when she tried to flee, he shot her. Where was the polite (but scary) guy at her door asking her polite (but scary) questions? The ones a REAL cop HOPEFULLY would ask. Ma’am can I see your license? Nope, this guy just ordered her outta the car and very quickly shot her.

I had trouble processing the videos that day and I know there are more now and I haven’t even watched all of them. All I could think of was how I would feel if were driving that car. In one that I did see, she told the ICE “cop” something like “I don’t hate you.” It sounded like multiple people were yelling and giving her maybe conflicting orders. Y’all have seen all these. I would’ve been totally freaked out and maybe a bit frozen encountering that kind of situation.

If I had been driving that car, I would have tried to get outta there ASAP. And that’s what I think she was doing. Trump was lying (lying lying lying lying because that’s what he does) when he said she ran over the ICE “cop” and he was in the hoosegow with critical injuries (or whatever). He was not injured. The ICE “cop” walked away unscathed from a minor “nudging” incident.

I want to see the ICE “cop” prosecuted. But. I also want to see ORGANIZED, PLANNED, deportation procedures where people are not randomly picked up because of their skin color or whatever and thrown onto planes to whatever country might take them, even if they have never lived in that country. This administration has even tried to deport US citizens. Yes, it has. Look it up somewhere besides MAGA slanted media.

I could go on and on about this but I will give kudos to the GG (aka Suzy Homemaker) who cleaned the hell outta the bathroom today, also the kitchen floor. I think he was partially providing silent commentary about my kinda half-assed cleaning efforts lately. (I do clean the toilet.) But I appreciated his efforts. When he starts cleaning stuff, I get outta the way. It works better that way.

The mini-win is that I heard the GG tell his ID twin that he agreed me about the shooting. I was like YES but we’re still in a marital journey through MAGA.

Twitter play:

Setting: War Memorial Hospital, Sault Ste. Siberia

The Commander: Just remember you were a *wanted* child. (Said umpteen bazillion times)
Kayak Woman: That may be true but I’m not sure I turned out like what you *wanted*.
[Nurse in the hallway raises her eyebrows.]
Kayak Woman [stage-whispering and giggling]: I was *not* the favorite child

First I have to commemorate The Commander’s birthday. This is her high school graduation pic, I think. A few years before I was a twinkle in my dad’s eye.

And it was a looooong time after that that I was born. 11 years after their marriage. I dunno if they were seriously trying at first (well sure they were KW, whether they knew it or not). But they did try for a long time. I’ve been told what the issue(s) were but I don’t remember and probably wouldn’t post it here anyway. To explain the Twitter play, I had a younger brother. They didn’t think he would live very long but he did although he succumbed at 47. Long story I don’t feel like writing about right now.

I joke that he was the favorite child. I know he wasn’t but he was fragile as a newborn and (of course) I had to take a bit of a back seat for a while.

The second pic is of The Comm threatening me with a kitchen knife at the moomincabin. Oh don’t worry, it was all in fun. We loved each other but I was a “spirited” (although often awkward) child and sometimes gave my parents grief. Like showing up on the sidewalk in front of our shabby little Superior Street bungalow in 9th grade with Bad Boyfriend in tow. Unexpectedly. “Where’d’ya find *him*?” In truth, I was as surprised as they were that he walked me home. [Delete a couple ensuing years of teenage drama.]

We are celebrating our Polish friend Diane’s birthday tonight at Amadeus, a Polish restaurant I haven’t been to since before covid. We’re having a pre-dinner ‘hattan here. Before covid, we were just training them to make ‘hattans but who knows where that knowledge has gone or who is even working there now.

And dare I mention it’s also Richard Nixon’s birthday? Given what’s going on nowadays, Tricky Dick’s presidency seems tame. At least people put the brakes on him. (Not that I am a Nixon scholar by any means.)

We had two goals for our outing today. One was to check out the huge amount of construction going on at Briarwood Mall. Basically, they have torn down the weakest (in my opinion) anchor store (Sears) and are building, uh, what? A big 2-story(?) grocery store and maybe other stores and a big “luxury” apartment building for “low income” folks, which doesn’t make a lot of sense, so maybe I misunderstood. I have read about this project but didn’t really process it. Any way, there’s a lotta construction flying around.

I have a couple of thoughts about all this. I don’t think MOST people WANT to live in apartments, especially high-rise apartments (the apartments being built are what I might call medium-rise, 5-6 stories or thereabouts). When we bought the Landfill I was looking specifically for a single-family house with a backyard. When the (small) one we bought also bordered a small adjacent woods, I was over the moon. I know that not everyone nowadays can afford such a situation, at least not in the city. We could barely afford it 40 years ago when we started our loverly little family.

My second thought is that the GG asked me when the last time I had been in Briarwood was. I could not remember. I finally ventured that it probably had something to do with the Apple Store. I know it was pre-COVID. We’ve been ordering new iPhones online since before COVID and my MacBook Pro is humming along nicely so hasn’t needed repairs (knock on wood). I had to order TWO “new” (refurbished) work PCs after COVID. Those things die like flies. At any rate I had stopped shopping in person for most things you might find at a mall long before COVID. Clothing? Hit or miss, mostly miss. Maybe an occasional trip with the beach urchins?

Since Briarwood is a couple miles up S. State from Cubelandia, I asked if we could dip down there and take a look. I am not sentimental about this place although I feel a bit of nostalgia for the good times we had when most of us worked there (at least some of the time). But we’d been outta there never to return since COVID. I had heard rumors that a church had moved in and yes! Bethesda Church (whatever that is). Who’da thunk it? I couldn’t really look inside as curious as I was.

It is a Wednesday. It is a dark gray fugly Wednesday. It’s okay, it’s January. We’re used to that. But. Today. The GG hiked to Dexter (10 miles) and I picked him up and he said, “Dooya wanna get lunch?” Well, yes. I have time for lunch. Oh, not that I couldn’t go out to lunch while I was working. It was totally okay and sometimes I did. Heck, years ago, the LSCHP went out to lunch just about every day. But mostly I did not and usually when I did, it was a work function.

And then. After lunch, I asked if the GG wanted to drive the back roads a bit. Well, sure. He was finicky about which roads, turning around on some roads that looked particularly muddy. But then again, he drove down other roads that were equally muddy. I couldn’t tell the difference. At one point I asked if he wanted to run Cygnus through the car wash. He didn’t and anyway that would have required us to deal with Wagner/Jackson Road traffic and Michigan left turns, etc. Not today. Cygnus is dirty but she’s happy.

We went east of the freeway (on a dirt road) for a few minutes until we encountered this train. Or trains. We couldn’t tell exactly what was going on but it seemed like they were connecting/disconnecting two (more more?) trains. So these train cars were not really moving at all until you heard a big BANG as a couple of trains knocked into each other somewhere down the tracks that you couldn’t see. So we turned around and wound our way home. (I dunno what “Guzzy Boys” are.)

Anyway, the point of this boring bunch of blather is that I did some things today! Nothing constructive, at least not more than the usual boring mini-chores. Changing the sheets, washing dishes, dealing with some odd online banking stuff (note to my main bank, don’t change things without providing a CLEAR explanation – you need MEEEE but don’t even think about trying to hire me). Anyway, it was a weekday and I got out and even initiated something (an after-lunch ride). One step at a time. But probably not without a lot of back-sliding.

Love y’all, KW.

This afternoon a beach urchin texted to alert us that the sidewalks were slippery, at least intermittently. Freeze and thaw, freeze and thaw.

I gave her a thumbs up for the alert but I knew that although the GG was talking about a “hike” earlier, he was now engaged in a big fugly prodject (as you can see) and wouldn’t likely be going out any time soon. And he didn’t.

He pulled a whole bunch of bags and boxes out of Moooon Yoooonit and the “coat closet”. You know the one. It’s where you store all your coats and jackets, even the ones you haven’t worn in years. And usually a vacuum cleaner or five, although this one doesn’t have any vacs. They are scattered around the Landfill. What it DOES have are TOOLS. Of every description. Multiples of most. Except chisels. There are multiple chisels but he couldn’t find any of them. Maybe they are in the Lyme Lounge? Which is in storage in the Uncly Uncle’s garage. In Gaylord. A three-four hour drive away. Oh well, he can get reunited with his chisels later.

All of this stuff was pretty disorganized. Like his dad The Gumper used to say, “I’m missing 10% of my stuff all the time. It’s just always a different 10%.”

So the GG pulled everything outta the bags and boxes, sorted it and reorganized it. This was pretty painful to watch but I think it needed to be done so I pulled out the “mantras” I use when dealing with adult children: “Go with the flow” and “stay outta the fray.”

Other than a zoom call with my only remaining MMCB this morning, it was a pretty slodgy day for me. I’ll get over it. I’ve been this way after xmas before, even during regular post-xmas periods with no “drama”. MMCB surprised me a bit (pleasantly) by asking if the GG and I would like to occasionally go out to dinner with her and her husband. She had never asked before because our other coffee buddy and her husband NEVER went out to eat. They were focused on cooking for their family and various guests. So I guess it just seemed a little awkward, which I understand. We don’t go out to eat a whole lot either and usually favor lunching but maybe this will be in my future! Maybe they’ll introduce us to Pacific Rim, which is one of their faves.

P.S. The GG says he actually uses most of these tools… I was like, if you can find them…

I am in the stage of “retirement” that I do not know what day of the week it is. The holidays have not helped with that. The GG came home from hiking trips today and took down xmas or at least most of it. The tree is out. There still seems to be a lot of clutter around but I don’t think it is exactly xmas clutter. The radio (NPR) and TV help with this situation a bit. We watch Andy Griffith on weeknights. He is not there on Saturday or Sunday.

Still. I dunno what I am doing although I may have some secret stuff up my sleeve. Other than that, it was a very boring day. I went to a grocery store and did word puzzles and did minor chores around here. The temperatures are rising and hopefully that means some of the ice in the doggamn driveway will melt. I soooo hate the freeze and thaw cycle.

I do not know what that thing is in the pic. My brain is just not processing it.

G’night. KW.

Try as I might I couldn’t immediately find more pictures of my childhood dog Tigger. This is a pic of Daisy (with Chloe Belle in the background), the most recent family dog to be (alas) put down. Daisy was The Beautiful Gay’s parents’ dog and TBG and the Uncly Uncle grabbed her after their deaths and cared for her until her death.

When I was a kid and had Tigger, a mutt who looked like a small golden retriever but probably had a lot of other crapola in her (no DNA testing then), I wasn’t crazy about what my family called “little yappy dogs.” I grew to know and love these little dogs, who are really not always yappy. Bichon Frises and I’m not sure what Daisy was. We were never sure what Tigger was exactly. [Delete long thoughts about my childhood with a fearless (and beautiful) mutt on the moominbeach where BEARS have been known to run.]

So Dogs I have known, in no particular order and definitely missing a lot… Fury, Tigger, Spot, Laker, Sam, Ernie, Alfred, Bandit, Chloe Belle, Daisy, Lexi, Sniffy(?), Rags (how could I fergit Rags, my grandma’s dog when I was a kid), Mia, Tippy, Buffy, Lacy, Java, Mo or Bo (can’t keep Jeep and Pan’s dogs’ names straight).

I can’t remember the name of my lifelong friend Barb’s golden retriever who knocked The Commander into the water on the beach and also grabbed Velvet the Mouse (a puppet). The Comm was fine. Velvet was a separate incident. I dived down to the beach to separate the dog’s jaws and retrieve Velvet. Barb was a beloved friend and neighbor but she couldn’t really control a big dog at that time and she pretty soon re-homed the dog.

My mouse and the racc came over to cook me dinner tonight. It was loverly. Salmon bowls with miso and rice and lots of veggies. I always have a good time talking to the racc. Hopefully I don’t talk too much. I am an introvert but I can get going. I will say that we are on the same page politically which helps with that.

I can’t say we didn’t talk politics tonight because we did but we also talked about other things including dogs. Well and horses and donkeys because his mom has owned those and she is much more of an aminal person than I am. But I did own a dog as a child. Her name was Tigger. I was terrified of dogs before we got Tigger, even my next door aunt and uncle’s dog Fury, who was not really a scary dog. I just didn’t understand dogs. Boots the cat was kinda scary but cats are cats and Boots did scratch people. Tigger was a stray puppy who landed at my dad’s banker boss’s back door one day. Pauline (boss’s wife) was a dog person and she knew we were looking for a dog and and that’s how we ended up with Tigger.

Me and a bunch of my cousins sat on the wood pile outside the Old Cabin all afternoon the day Tigger was scheduled to come home. It was a long day but eventually my dad arrived with Tigger in tow. She wasn’t named yet and I was terrified of her. She was jumping all over the place at first. Eventually she settled down and went to sleep and somehow I was able to pick her up (UKW helped with that) and I fell soooo in love with her and have never been afraid of dogs again. I wanted to name her something like Blondie (I was *five*) but my aunt Bubs suggested Tigger because she bounced. That stuck and it was a good name for my dog.

Honestly I think I have spent the last hour looking for this picture. I found it earlier tonight. Could I find it again? No I could not. Tag yer pics, KW.

I bought this loverly jacket on a family trip to downhill ski at Steamboat Springs. I rode out there in my uncle’s big something or other (license plate BGY747) with two aunts and uncles and a couple of cousins and a cousin’s wife. My dad drove out there separately with a friend and a couple other cousins met us there from Utah. It was a fun trip but I won’t go into all the details except that my cousin Grinch and I went out to the bars most nights and people really liked us and would buy us drinks and stuff. We were so much older then, we’re younger than that now. Or maybe it’s the reverse.

That ski outfit also had some matching “overalls” and I didn’t really buy it. My dad did. He also bought me a new pair of skis because the ones I took out there broke on a downhill run. Privileged? Yes, at least sorta although we aren’t anywhere near Warren Buffet. But I do try to pay whatever privilege I have forward.

This pic is quite a few years later. I was at Hoton Lake hanging out with the GG. I am not wearing the overalls here because we were x-c skiing and overalls are just too damn hot when you are x-c skiing. Clothing is so different now. I haven’t worn jeans since Calvin Klein changed the form factor. Nowadays we have merino leggings and I have a featherweight merino jacket and base layers are the new bizcaz. And I have totally embraced being a skirt gal.

P.S. My aunt Katie aka The White Tornado was never really much of a ski enthusiast and I don’t remember if she skied at all during that trip. She did clean the hell out of the broiler pan in our rental condo. Probably hadn’t been properly cleaned in years.

Lemme see, they have skied or snow-shoed at Forbush, Beaver Creek, the ski ranch, Hartwick Pines, and the Mason Tract. It didn’t surprise me that the Mason Tract seemed to have been the trickiest/most squirrelly. It is a narrow up and down trail and it doesn’t get groomed for skiing (they were skiing today) except maybe for an occasional volunteer groomer. It follows the south branch of the Au Sable River and has an interesting history if y’all feel like googling “Mason Tract”. One of my main memories of skiing/hiking/whatever the Mason Tract is of watching a huge porcupine scale a tree. It’s a small memory but a good one. These places are all within an easy drive of the Hoton Lake Group Home, which we are always happy to share with younger family members and their friends. The pic is Hartwick Pines, I think. Snowy ski trails all kinda look the same after a while.

I feel like my uncle Austin of RAM fame may have had some involvement in the Mason Tract but I can’t remember why except that I think it is state land, and so would have been under Austin’s purview when he headed the Michigan DNR. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. He was more of an owls in the refrigerator guy than a bureaucrat.

Happy New Year! I was surprised by a text message this morning from my former work friend K, a wonderful Indian-American man and development WIZARD. I returned his kindness and assured him that I was FINE! Because I am. I don’t really expect to hear from former work friends. I know that’s not really how it all works, having been on the other side of this for many years. The survivor’s guilt can be crippling in terms of talking to laid-off former co-workers. At least it always was for me. But I really appreciated that text.

Haha, and then LinkedIn sent me some spam that PNC Bank was looking for business systems analysts. This cracked me up on so many levels. A couple of them are: 1) I have a looooong history with PNC (one that pre-dates *PNC* by many years) and it’s still my main bank of quick liquidity and 2) I am not looking for a job. Um, I was gonna retaaaar? I had something else to say but the GG just asked for a refill (he’s watching the Rose Bowl even though we don’t have a dog in this race) and it totally flew outta my head. You’re welcome!

This was a couple of new year’s eves past at Little Cat Z’s house. We were planning to do it again last year but a norovirus canceled that big time. I have been forbidden to talk about that but it *is* my blahg. This year, LCZ and friends are x-c skiing/snow-shoeing at the Hoton Lake Group Home. They seem to be having a great time and I am happy for them.

We are here on the Planet Ann Arbor and there is somebody playing football on TV (OSU maybe?) and it is what it is. We grilled some mini filets and rounded that out with leftover potatoes and gravy and frozen peas and friends. Not a lavish NYE dinner but it worked.

Apparently the Racc made some lemon pigs today so I had to post this pic.

I don’t have much else to say except Happy New Year.

Our skiers traversed Beaver Creek and the ski ranch today. Beaver Creek is “across the street” from RAM, which is a state-run conference center named after The Commander’s brother, aka my uncle “Austin”, which was his middle name and what we called him. He was the director of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources when I was a child/teenager and he was the father of my beloved (alas, late) cousin Teri and grandfather of her daughter Anastasia, who he never met because he died when Teri and I were barely out of our teens. There are big freeway signs pointing out the exits for this place.

He was a naturalist with a phd and The Commander often talked about how he would store OWLS and things in the family refrigerator in their grandparents’ farmhouse where they lived in Garden City when they were kids. (Last I knew there was a fast food restaurant where that house used to be.) Ralph Austin was a few years older than The Comm, Frances Carolyn (they were #2 and #3 out of five children) and I get the idea that he looked out for her, driving her around with his friends, etc., back in the day when 25 cents would fill the gas tank.

She revered him and, as luck would have it, she married a guy he (and everybody in the MacMu family) got along with (aka my dad), a flight instructor in WWII. I’m thinking Austin might have been a flight instructor too? That’s not how my parents met but I think Austin was at their bare bones wedding out in the American southwest. Mom took a train out there and that’s a good story but not tonight. My MacMu grandfather wanted to go too but it didn’t quite work out because war. F*ck war.

Austin married Helen and they had Sally and Teri and they visited the moomincabin every summer AND THEY HAD NO PROBLEM USING THE DAMN OUTHOUSE! They qualified as “cool” aunt and uncle but I had a LOT of cool aunts and uncles. I do remember that Austin witnessed my FinFam uncle Duke and a friend of his illegally fishing at the moominbeach and did NOT turn them in.

I won’t write more about the MacMullan family tonight. I’m kind of laughing because until a few days ago, I had never heard the conference center called RAM. It is his initials but RAM also matches his state government work personality when he had to deal with “difficult elected officials”. Years ago, a Detroit Free Press columnist (Bob Talbot) wondered who Ralph A. MacMullan (of freeway sign fame) was. One of the things his research turned up was that my uncle was one of the few people who could shout down (long dead) Michigan yooperland firebrand senator Joe Mack. RAM!

Photo credit to Little Cat Z.

It’s a wrap. I am out. I am fine although I can’t say it’s the easiest thing I’ve ever done. “Some people” were worried that it wouldn’t be done quickly but after working for Corporate America for 18 years and seeing their systems evolve a lot, I knew it would be quick. And it was. Done.

After I did the deed, I really wanted to go for a ride out in the county again but today was a snow day. The back roads would’ve been fine (it wasn’t really a lot of snow) but getting there with all the nutso traffic would not be fun.

The pic is one Little Cat Z sent us from the Great White North on the way to an x-c ski area. She’s been staying at the Hoton Lake Group Home and yesterday it was ICE but today was more conducive to skiing as you might be able to see via the pic. There were other pics but I won’t post them because there were people in them. There is more snow there and tons of snow in the eastern yooperland, where the moomincabin is.

I think we put LCZ on skis at about the age of three. We backpacked our baby mouse on that trip – she wasn’t walking yet. At one point, LCZ was solo for a few minutes traveling between me and the GG. I remember hearing her answer a friendly stranger’s question with, “I’m with my mommy and my daddy.” A person who no doubt was wondering why a tiny child was skiing alone. I came around a corner right around that time, which put that good Samaritan’s fears at ease.

Mouse was on skis by the age of two. Tiny red rental skies. She rocked it for a couple days and then I made the mistake of saying I would take her on the “little kid loop”. Oops. Tantrum. I picked her up, skis and all, headed up to the counter in the ski ranch and told Bob, “We’re done!” Having four children of his own, he just laughed.

A few years later, I was skiing with mouse on the Manitou Trail, a 5K loop at the ski ranch. She was a great skier by then but that was probably a bit too long for a five-year-old and before it was all over, I was carrying ALL FOUR of our ski poles in my left hand and holding her hand in my right. (Note that little kids don’t really need ski poles, they just want them because everybody else has them.) We were slodging along for a while when she said (in true mouse style), “Mom, why do I think about volcanoes so much?” How does a mother answer a question like that? I didn’t really know but to be fair I used to worry about volcanoes and things when I was that age too. In fact, non-religious me even “prayed” every night that we wouldn’t get “hit” by a tornado or volcano (and a whole list of other disasters I was worried about). Anyway it was a long slodge on the Manitou Trail that day.

I don’t think it is an atmospheric river (and no one is calling it that) but man oh man did it rain today. The GG has been bugging me to get out and go for a ride in the county and although I like doing that, I haven’t really been in the mood lately. Of course, he has also wanted to go shopping at Cabela’s and I was not a fan. We’ll talk about my lifelong relationship with shopping (or not) some other day. I spend as little time as possible in bricks and mortar stores these days. Wasn’t always that way.

Anyway, he tried again to get me outta dodge today. This time shopping wasn’t mentioned and I was ready. For one thing, rain rides can be the best and this WAS a rain ride. Where’re we goin’? Manchester area (that’s southwest of the Planet Ann Arbor). Okay. I knew we would be taking back roads and we did. And here is one of them. It was very icy but navigable at a very slow speed.

We made our way from there to somewhere near Grass Lake, which is a village and a lake of the same name. I’m trying to remember if I’ve ever been there before. Probably but can’t really remember. The GG suddenly backed up Cygnus X-1 and I was like, whut? Oh, because there were skeletons there. He took photos out the driver’s side window with both my phone and his. He thinks doe and fawn? Not sure but seems like the right sizes. Hope this pic is not too freaky. Growing up on Lake Superior, dead birds and aminals were always floating in and decaying (and sometimes dying slowly on the beach, which is worse). But I am used to looking at skeletons.

Eventually we turned back homeward and as I kind of expected, we ended up at Cleary’s Pub in Chelsea. It was raining SOOOO hard when we got there, that the GG dropped me off right outside the back door. I was NOT really under-dressed but 38 degrees and rain was a little bit more than my base layers and stuff could handle. I only had to go a few feet to get into Cleary’s but I was wet and freezing when I grabbed seats for us at the bar and ended up wearing his jacket for a while to warm up. I ordered a cabernet IMMEDIATELY, which helped me warm up, then a second to drink with my chili.

We heard an “explosion” a while ago. I was like, “What was that?” A couple years ago there was a propane explosion around this time of year that leveled a house 10 miles north of here and killed four people. I dunno what this was. People on the Ann Arbor Townies facebook group think it might have been thunder. I’m not sure. It’s a weird time of year for thunder but it happens and it’s rainy and actually pretty warm right now. That will change overnight.