Random bits of my so-called life.

Re-reading yesterday’s blahg entry, I was musing about languages. Growing up in my little northern yooperland city, everyone I talked to spoke English like I did. There were undoubtedly some grandparents and parents of the kids I knew who had varying degrees of competence ranging from a bit of an accent to not at all. I’m mainly talking about people who spoke European languages for this post. I’m leaving thoughts about the Native Americans in the area and their languages out of this particular post. It’s important but beyond the scope of this post.

It wasn’t until I began my checkered series of “careers” here on the Planet Ann Arbor that I banged up against people who were not always easy for me to understand. Especially my current career in which I work with a number of people in or from India. “She’s talking to Indi-uh”, I heard The Grinch tell another cousin (in a British-type accent) outside the Lyme Lounge one day when I was working at the moominbeach. Yup. I was on the “phone” with iDeep. Fluent English with a light accent and *extremely* fluent written English. Oxford comma discussions, anyone?

Make no mistake! I fully realize that some of my co-workers probably have trouble understanding my high-energy fast-talking English. A combo of yooperland and Northern Cities Vowel Shift (google it). So it goes both ways. I am capable of slowing down and I do. I mean, if I have questions, I’m not gonna get answers if nobody can understand my gabblety gabblety.

When I was 10 and my brother was seven, our parents took us on a trip around Lake Superior. A trivia note: this was before there was a bridge to Canananada so we rode the ferry to get across the St. Marys river to start our trip.

We stopped at a rest area somewhere up King’s Highway 17 North and my brother made friends with a little girl around his age in the parking lot. He was speaking English. She was speaking French. The Commander asked him how they were talking to each other using different languages. His answer was something like, “You just have to put your mouth a different way.” Which is undoubtedly not un-true. But.

The only spoken language I know is English. When people ask me what languages I know (which they rarely do), I always answer “FORTRAN”. Some people still know what FORTRAN is. My kids both know Spanish. One of my kids is actually pretty talented at languages. She took both French and Spanish in high school and learned some Wolof when she did study abroad in Dakar.

Finally, that fiddle-head is in Hawaii. The title: I used to sometimes tell my kids to “stop fiddly-doodling around and getcher [damn] boots on.” Or whatever it was I wanted them to do. I’m sure they HATED when I said that.

I was in meetings with my TWO (count ’em) colleagues today. The ones who speak my “language” and I am not talking about native speaking languages. I’m talking about WORK languages. Like developer vs. designer.

This is dicey to write about but at one point my newly acquired colleagues and I were talking about password change functionality throughout the years. MANY years ago, our system sent a gibberish type password to a person trying to change theirs. You’ve probably experienced that kind of thing on many web sites. I certainly have. That got changed MANY years ago for various reasons and I won’t tell you what the process is now. Actually I’m not even sure I know what it is. I won’t tell you all the reasons either (I can’t even remember them) but one is that users were receiving temporary passwords with “bad words” in them. As in foul language. I’m remembering a beloved former colleague complaining about this to no end.

Lewie Lewii was religious (Jehovah’s Witness, which he NEVER brought to work). A very sweet man and a car aficionado. When I bought the Ninja (Honda Civic SI with a 6-speed manual tranny), he sidled up to me one day and said, “Can I ask you a personal question?” Well, uh, okay? “Is that Civic your car?” Yes. Yes it was. He seemed a little surprised that a baggy old 50-something kayak woman might be driving something like that. With performance taaaars no less.

The pic is of some temporary co-workers at Cubelandia a long time ago. This seems to be a Valentine partay. Broooosie provided Sparty and Wolverine. I brought Green Guy and Frooooggy to work. I was struggling to remember what all the party stuff in my cube was about. The party certainly didn’t happen in my cube. Looking at the date of the pic, I realize the streamers were leftover from what my boss and colleagues greeted with me when I returned to work after The Commander died. They did remove the ladder.

Brooosie is an interesting character in his own right but he is not the person who complained about the foul language in the temporary passwords. I’m pretty sure he didn’t even know about that.

Marital Discord at the Landfill a few weeks ago, a Twitter play.

KW: I want to relocate my sewing area upstairs to mouse’s old bedroom.
GG: But what about all my stuff in mouse’s bedroom?
KW: You’ve taken over lizard breath’s old room and now you want to take over mouse’s too?

This weekend, the GG dredged my sewing musheen “table” up outta the Landfill Dungeon and here it is. I figured out years ago that the dungeon was NOT a good place to do fiber art (or any kind of art). There is NO DAYLIGHT at all and the incandescent lights are not terribly high in wattage. And it’s a mess down there. So here is my “table” in the Purple Room (a story for another day perhaps). It’s actually my childhood desk and I want to get rid of it and replace it with something more appropriate for sewing. I “fit” the desk in a physical sense but I would like to have a little more legroom and, oh, I dunno what else. Need to scout around online…

To the right in the next pic is where this desk used to be. Would you be comfortable working in this messy room with minimal light? The light is lying. It is not that bright.

The dresser is a point of Marital Discord that hasn’t been fully resolved. I want to get rid of it (and its twin and the two identical HUGE desks that go with them). I believe I made some progress when I declared that I would not be comfortable in mouse’s old room with so much stuff in it and probably would not want to use it. He conceded (a bit) by putting the dresser in the closet with a couple of Anny Hubbard art pieces on top of it. A peace offering maybe? Okay. For now…. (We do have to keep a bed in this room for the very occasional guest and I am okay with that.)

To me, this is a long and complicated prodject. What I really want to do is hire Schlepper’s Haulaway (a real company and a cool one) or someone to come and take about half of the stuff out of our shithole house and take it wherever. But I am eating an elephant and this little bite is a start.

First, I did not take these photos. The Uncly Uncle (the other half of the Twinz of Terror) texted them and a bunch of others to the cFam spam group beginning yesterday. (Used with permission.)

The first is at his house in Gaylord where they were hit with a heavy ice storm. Lots of trees and branches came down but I don’t think there was any major damage to his house. But after a night without power and no end in sight, he and TBG (his wife), decamped to the group home at hoton lake, where it was too warm for ice (an hour or so south of Gaylord) but heavy rain flooded the yard (second pic).

Back before we rebuilt the group home, a rain like this would flood the kitchen. Once when Lizard Breath was a toddler, we met the UU up there for the weekend. We were upstairs in bed when he arrived and we heard SPLASH! SHIT! It was dark and he had dropped his pillow in the water🤪 The new group home is built four/five steps off the ground with a half-height basement underneath.

Here on the Planet Ann Arbor, we just got a severe storm alert on our phones. Way too warm for snow or ice here but we do worry a bit about wind, especially living in what is essentially an urban forest. The GG is wondering if he should put the cars in the street. I sure don’t want a tree to smash my car (been there done that) but I’m not sure it would be any safer in the street. It’s getting very dark and we’re getting radio warnings left and right but we’ll see what we end up getting.

The UU was scheduled to head down here today for a couple days of hiking with his twin. Right about now, he would be enjoying a nice pre-steak-dinner ‘hattan at the Landfill. It was not to be.

Meanwhile… the beach urchins are soaking up Mr. Golden Sun with Pengo Janetto (who is also a beach urchin) on a beach in Hawaii. Beach urchin is what I call all children who have grown up on the FinFam beach, even if they didn’t spend the whole summer there. I am definitely a beach urchin. My dad was a beach urchin. The Commander was not (Detroit gal) but she loved the beach and enthusiastically participated in beach community culture.

Follow-up to yesterday. If we had anything in our yard resembling an actual garden, a groundhog could and probably would be very destructive. But we don’t🐽

P.S. The Planet Ann Arbor storm was basically a “plassover” and we are gonna grill those afore-mentioned steaks.

The GG was all excited this afternoon because of a “gopher” sighting in the Landfill back yard. My brain was busy churning away on a plan to eat an elephant and didn’t process the aminal type at first. Then he showed me a picture he took. It’s fuzzy. He took it from pretty far away. But that looked like a groundhog/woodchuck/whistle pig to me.

I said, “I don’t think that’s a gopher.” He then tried “woodchuck”. Okay, now we’re on the right track. It is a GROUNDHOG! I don’t know if gophers are common in Michigan. According to wikipee, they are not because they don’t like cold weather. Groundhogs? We have those aplenty. What ensued was a bunch of fun facts about gophers and groundhogs. There’ll be a quiz…

Apparently this groundhog frequents a “den” under the she-shed. Yesterday the GG blocked the entrance to the den. Today the entrance was back open. Is this war? I dunno. We’re not sure how much damage groundhogs do. I’m pretty sure porcupines can do a lot of damage but I don’t *think* we have them around here.

Before Instagram got totally jammed up with spam (hey Zuck), I stumbled upon “Chunk the Groundhog”. Jeff the Gardener in Delaware set up a cam to figger out who was eating his produce. Turned out it was Chunk the Groundhog. So Jeff set up a separate garden for Chunk. I was enchanted by Chunk at the beginning. Other aminals also show up, Posse the Possum with his glowing eyes and Stinkerbelle (guess which aminal🐽) and more. Google if you’re interested in this story. I heard a segment on NPR not too long ago. I still follow Chunkland but I don’t often look closely at the posts any more. There is just too much “suggested” content on Instagram these days. I hate wading through it to find content from people I know IRL or have *intentionally* followed. Take a note, Zuck. Like Zuck is reading this blahg of blather. In yer dreams, KW.

Although a war between the GG and a groundhog might be interesting, he (hilariously) doesn’t usually win wars against rodents😵‍💫

Yer fav-o-rite blahgger from back in the day? The GG, looking at it from across the room, thought it was our mouse. Not! Jeebus.

My mouse encountered MMCB₁ in her Plum Market department today and didn’t recognize her at first. An out of context encounter. MMCB₁ is the mother of one of mouse’s middle/high school classmates as well as my good friend.

As we were leaving for Dexter’s Pub for dinner tonight, the neighbor had his medically fragile baby outside in her pram for a bit of the warm sunshine we got at the end of today. She has a long road ahead of her but she is beautiful and thriving and we are silently cheering for her and her parents. Good people and so hard for them.

To explain the pic, it was something at the “Warf” in San Francisco on my solo trip out there. I loved it there. I loved my daughter (Lizard) and life-long friend Jess’s apartment in Berkeley. I slept on the couch and was reminded to keep my shoes next to me on the floor. In case of earthquake, don’tcha know. I was taking intense community college web design/dev courses at the tine and got up early every day to do homework. It was my spring break.

There was a small earthquake while I was out there. 4.? We were in a Starbucks in Oakland when it happened and I didn’t notice it until Lizard told me about it. The only earthquake I have ever felt was here on The Planet Ann Arbor. Some glass vases and things on a shelf in The Landfill started rattling and didn’t stop right away. 1.? earthquake I found out later.

The first time I noticed Lizard’s friend Jess was in the MYA (alternative “open” middle school) office. I was there with Lizard and Jess and her mom were also there. My intuition kicked in and I thought something like, “What a nice friend that girl would be for my daughter.” I forgot about the whole thing but within the next couple weeks, there started to be emails between Lizard and Jess. This was back in the days of one email address per family, right? Yes. From there, they were fast friends. High school and college and San Francisco together. Lizard moved back home to Ann Arbor and the yooperland (as she planned to do after a few years on the left coast). Jess is still in the SanFran area and they are still great friends. (And I hope it was okay to blahg about that.)

Dexter’s Pub? We got to help “break in” a new server on her second day. With the usual stuff that goes along with porterization. She was wonderful and obviously had previous restaurant experience. Like her main issue was that she didn’t have the entire beer list memorized yet. NO PROBLEM! I tipped her well but I always tip well. Servers work hard and so many people mistreat them, often for things that are not their fault.

AI as in Artificial Intelligence. Sloppily applied to applications where people (or me anyway) don’t want it.

Like, my phone is suddenly listing email messages with two line summaries of the email’s content, translated by AI. One I got from blahggy friend Margaret summarized a blahg comment:

Wasted time commuting to office, one person in broom closet with no electricity.

That *is* the essence of her comment but her actual comment made much more sense talking about the huge waste of time, etc. commuting takes and providing an example of a horribly planned RTO situation. Although I have to admit that now I am actually *thinking* about the AI translation, I am absolutely cracking up. “One person in broom closet with no electricity?” Indeed. And don’t get me wrong, I *do* feel for the broom closet person. C’mon “youse” guys, you can do better than that.

Corporate America? You are doing this to people not because they can’t be productive working from home but because you are following Trump and some out-of-touch billionaires. Who are probably *never* required to commute to an office. Well, maybe from private helicopter pad to private helicopter pad. I worked from home today and I am psychologically exhausted! And fulfilled, feeling like I had done a lot of good. I know there are unproductive remote workers but there are also unproductive office workers. Disclaimer: I would *hate* commuting by helicopter. My old 8-mile Zen Commute in the Ninja, my beauteous old 6-speed manual transmission Honda Civic, was loverly.

I veered off the track. My point is that I do not want AI to summarize my email messages for me. And I don’t want it to rearrange my messages and suggest messages to “follow up” on, which it is also doing. Nope. I can manage my own mail. It is 99% spam anyway and I delete it just by looking at who it came from and what the subject is.

That’s Flappy in the pic. Do not try to take her food! I traveled solo to San Francisco in March 2007 to visit one of my beach urchins and this is one of the pics I took. We were on Fisherman’s “Warf” as we were calling it (and then laughing uproariously). Froggy named Flappy (Flappy is female according to Froggy) and some other birds. Actually he didn’t meet them in person because he was back in my beach urchin’s apartment with the slugs and the ants. He probably named them too🤪

So my boss came back and I gained a new colleague and then… Ka-whomp! A whole bunch of stuff that had been pushed to the back burner of my work life returned in a big smash-up. Because most of it has been on hold for so long and I have a new colleague to coach, I am having to re-learn a lot of things, or at least refresh my memory. “Triggers” for one thing. Oh, don’t worry, these are not the kind of triggers that, well, *trigger* PTSD.

On top of that, file explorer or whatever it’s called kept haaaaaanging on my work laptop this morning. I couldn’t even shut down so eventually I tried a hard shutdown. Which was an interesting experience I couldn’t describe if I tried. This was very scary behavior even though everything else seemed to be working fine and it kicked my small coffee high into the stratosphere. After a couple of shutdowns, I avoided using file explorer ALL DAY. Imagine the work-arounds I had to do if you want. Finally when I was about to shut down at end-of-day, I tentatively tried it again. Working! But for how long…

The pic is the three young ladies from yesterday plus the Mean Old Grunchie Old Grinchie, who is UKW’s older brother. This photo collage is an artifact of my childhood. It hung on the wall in the hall (I think) of my grandparents’ house in Sault Ste. Siberia along with a companion picture of my Uncle Don’s four children. They were all older than us although Mac was only older than the Grinch by a month. They were partners in terrorizing their triplet of girl cousins three years younger (in the pic). It was okay. We could give it right back to them.

At the time of the pic, there were only eight of us cousins. Three more children were born into our generation after this pic, including my little brother. They were never incorporated into this kind of photo form factor as far as I know.

Providing my opinion on RTO (and I do not have to RTO, thank you Zeus) would be totally “non-PC”. Some buzzwords come to mind, like “collaboration” and “synergy”. Foff. This is totally a conformation to the second Trumpian Bombasty. How about cacophonic NOISE and long discussions about Severance or whatever the latest video game is. I will say that one time when the power went out at the office, the LSCHP decided we should drive over to the wings bar to collaborate on whatever we were collaborating about. That was fun and we did get things done despite the whine🤪

But I have always been able to work from home and I can tell you that we are collaborative and have synergy even when we are online. And because of that, we were able to JUMP online overnight back in March 2020.

P.S. RTO is “return to office” if you haven’t been playing along with 2025 corporate America.

The text message came in late this afternoon. I wasn’t thinking about what to blahg about yet except to think I didn’t really have anything. The question was about the definition of second cousins.

I dunno, people seem to confuse me with The Google but I decided to answer this one because I have a really good pic of first cousins and second cousins. Which is today’s pic.

So, on the FinFam side of my fam (my dad’s relatives), three girl children were born the same year. Me (January), Pooh (May), and UKW (July). We were the main perpetrators of the legendary Two-year-old Summer at the Old Cabin. According to our mothers, it was also cold and rainy EVERY day that summer🤪

Wouldn’t you know, the three of us first cousins went on to birth our first children within a year. Pooh and UKW are holding their baby boys. And yer fav-o-rite blahgger is on the right with her baby girl (circa six months older than the boys). So these three bee-yoo-ti-ful women are me and my first cousins. The babies are second cousins to each other. My first cousins and I share the same grandparents. These babies and a whole slew of children of other (beloved) cousins’ children, share a set of great-grandparents. Our grandparents. At this point, another generation has begun in one branch of the FinFam but we won’t go into third cousins today except that they share great-great grandparents.

I think one of the things that confuses people about degrees of cousin is that in a lot of families the cousins span quite a few years (20 in mine). So if you are the youngest cousin, your oldest cousin may already be having children by the time you are born and if you do get to know those cousins, they are referred to as simply “cousins”, although they are actually first cousins once removed. If you don’t have a “family beach” like I have, you may not even get to know them.

If you are an ancestry.com geek, you probably know all of this stuff already. I have an ancestry geek friend who has connected with 6th and 7th cousins and figured out that she and her husband are distant cousins. I’ve done the spit thing and i am a geek in general but I can’t quiiiite work up the nerve to put my DNA out there into the world.

Amazon Woman scheduled our weekly BA team meeting when she came back. Last week, we met just the two of us. Which was how it was for a couple years before long ago layoffs. Today. I was surprised (but shouldn’t have been) when our new BA started the meeting. When I got the start meeting notification, it took me an instant or two to remember that this is a *team* meeting, not just me and Amazon Woman. Or just me. Which is what the last couple years have been like. Kinda. When people asked me during that period how I was doing, I would say “I am an adult and I can carry on.” And I could. And I did. But I am so happy to be part of a *team* again.

What was fun today was when I asked our new Floridian colleague if he had ever dealt with snow or if he was a native Floridian. He does know about snow and ice (DC area) and then I segued into where I grew up and of all things, Amazon Woman pulled up a Google map of the moominbeach. She had the address because she had to send me a laptop when mine died a few years ago. So I said, see Bay Mills/Brimley? Go east a bit and do you see that island? Yes. That’s in front of our beach. So. I said that if I ever felt like I might need to deport myself from my beloved country, I could kayak to Canananada. Note to Trumpian folks on the off chance they might be monitoring this obscure little blahg. I don’t like how you are running the country but I am doing my best to carry on. And I don’t plan to deport myself to Canada or anywhere else.

I told my boss and co-worker that my grandparents had bought our beach 100 years ago and that their descendants (my dad and his siblings) were able to keep the property and so me and my cousins still own portions of it. We are lucky in that respect. So many of my childhood friends remember visiting grandparents on waterfront property that their families have not been able to keep in the family.

The kiddos in this pic are my dad and his sibs. Radical Betty, dad and Don, and Bubs, my youngest aunt. They are all gone now but they were all so much fun and I miss them.

Not a lot of big trees in this pic. The land had been lumbered before Granddaddy and his friends bought it. By the time I was a beach urchin, there were big trees everywhere. Nowadays we live in a huge forest of red and white pines and other stuff.

This is another vernal pond pic from my mouse. How many frooogs are in the pic? Believe it or not, it took me a while to get the answer, which is probably obvious to most folks.

This will be another rambly kind of blahg post because that’s (in a way) what kind of day it was. I finished up last night’s dishioshios this morning. I mean the ones I don’t put in the dishwasher. Not because they aren’t dishwasher safe. Just because they are big and I didn’t *run* the dishwasher last night. I just wanted them washed and put away and I usually air-dry anything I wash by hand.

I’m sure we all have different dishwasher/ing strategies. Mine is definitely different from James Beard (I think that’s who it was). The story goes that once when his regular “kitchen cleanup guy” was not available, he jammed a whole bunch of stemmed wine glasses into the dishwasher haphazardly, the result being shards of crystal everywhere. I read that somewhere once. Dunno if it’s true. If it was on Truth Social, probably not, but it wasn’t on Truth Social. More likely it was the NYT or New Yorker. Maybe even a dead tree issue. Which is one reason why it wouldn’t have been on Truth Social. Also, Trump eats hamberders, roight? You don’t need a dishwasher to clean up after a McDonald’s meal. Just throw the paper on the floor for the peons to clean up and throw catsup at the wall ’cause your inner toddler is angry at whatever it’s angry about at that moment. So he wouldn’t have been talking about James Beard anywhere, roight?

So the GG rambled out to Dexter this morning, where I met him for lunch at Dexter’s Pub. We sat at the bar and I had a bowl of chili. Himself had Avocado Toast, lah-di-dah. I have to say it looked really really good and I think the next time we go there on a Sunday, I will try it out, assuming it’s on the brunch menu that day. We like to sit at the bar (in any restaurant) if it’s just us or maybe one other person (a beach urchin or npJane or whoever). I am finally over covid cowardice enough to actually *sit* at the bar, which can be crowded but today was not.

My mouse and I had a discussion last night about whether I could (or would) use the rest of the red cabbage we bought for last night’s Landfill Dinner. I said yes. This morning (at the Plum) I bought a red onion for tonight’s food. When I got home, I was putting things into the fridge and there was a purply-red thing in the top crisper. For a split second, I thought, “Why did I buy a red onion? I already have one”. Oh yeah, it is red CABBAGE. Some of it is in our salad for tonight.

We’ve been trying to figger a Landfill Dinner for a couple weeks now. Somebody mentioned Tuesday Cheeseburger Night. Around the same time, the GG independently asked why we never have hamburgers for dinner. Well. It’s the damn Bun Problem. We are two people and so often hamburger buns come in packages of four or six or whatever. And no they don’t freeze all that well, at least not in my not-so-humble opinion. We are (usually) two people. Neither of us eat more than one burger EVER. We can buy ground beef in appropriate portions but what do we do with the extra buns?

I seized on the idea of Cheeseburger Night as a way to have hamburgers at home without a lot of extra buns ending up in the compost. This is a Saturday, not a Tuesday, but who cares. We did it *anyway*. Mouse and I both organized the burgers independently, which was stupid on my part because I should’ve known she would have a better plan. I had bought pre-made burgers but it turns out that she likes to load up the meat with seasonings and stuff. That was okay. I thawed the pre-made burgers and she was able to add ingredients and re-make loaded up burgers. Homemade aioli, grilled sweet potato slices, and red cabbage and cucumbers rounded things out. Oh, and pretzel buns for the burgers. She brought some things from home and also sent me a grock list and then I met up with her at the market (where she was working) to get it all figured out.

I am big-time rambling at this point. Just that I love having my beach urchins close enough to be able to visit within a few minutes. There is a house for sale around the corner. Is that too close? Whether or not it is, there have been a few signs that housing prices are inching downward. Alas, I am not optimistic about “the economy” in this repeat era of chaotic policy and mean (yes) leaders who care nothing about their constituents.

My mouse took this pic of a fairy shrimp in a vernal pond near her house. A vernal pond is a pond that only exists early in the spring, providing a habitat for very specific species. I had never heard of vernal ponds until a couple years ago when mouse moved into that house and don’t know much about them.

Amtrak comin’ through on our way back from dinner at Dexter’s Pub. After this encounter, someone realized he was missing his *flask*. My question was why did you take a flask to a restaurant? It was in his sweatshirt pocket and it must’ve fallen out when he was removing dropped menus and various debris from the floor under our table. Um, I know you like to help other people but you don’t get paid to clean the restaurant and it wasn’t icky dirt, just paper crapola. We returned to the restaurant and they did indeed have the flask and all is well.

I am not a big fan of excessive ceremony and I don’t really like toasting to things, at least not 20 times a night. I cringe when I am at weddings and people keep clinking their glasses or whatever to make the newlyweds kiss over and over and over again. But TONIGHT! I was the first to raise a glass.

Who/What did I toast? My new colleague. It’s early in the game but I think this person will be wonderful and that we’ll get along well. My new colleague is quick, smart, and proactive about learning the ropes. There is a LOT to learn but I think they will do well and I find myself “leaning in” to my potential role in helping them learn our product. Talking today, there were a few times I felt like we were on the verge of finishing each other’s sentences. For a couple unblahggable reasons, it’s been a couple years since I’ve had a work person I could, I dunno, talk to. I mean with a meeting of the minds. I love the dev guys but they are, well, developers, not unlike engineers. I am not a developer (or an engineer). Our minds do often meet but it can be difficult to find the right words to get us to that meeting point.

Now I’ve got my new-old boss back and a new colleague. Although I have had the means to quit working for many years and am past retirement age, this new combo might allow me to formulate a graceful exit strategy. Not quite ready yet. And as always, they could lay me off without warning at any moment…

But for the moment: clink clink clink cheers.

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