I can’t decide whether “Dr. Michigan” is a troll or a random robot spammer. I get a lot of random spam. Akismet takes care of 99.99% of it* and I catch the rest of it by evaluating first time comments and rejecting or approving them. Usually, I reject. “Your blog has such wonderful information. I will bookmark it.” (etc. etc. etc.) Yeah roight. My blahg is random blather!

I could go either way on Dr. Michigan. He (and I am guessing he is a he, if he isn’t just random spam) does have a website, which I’m not going to link to because I don’t know who he is and his website looks [to me] like an attempt to set up something people might think is real. I am on the fence about that. My reasons are too long and boring to relate here.

His question hit close to home though. Yes, the “girls” still do go swimming in Lake Superior “every morning up there”. Well. Not *every* morning.

Now for the long answer…

1) When I was a little kid, I pretty much tried to put my bathing suit on as soon as we moved out to the cabin (the day after school got out in June) and not take it off until we moved back to town (Labor Day). It may have been 40 degrees out there but we swam as much as we possibly could. *Morning*, noon, and night. I can remember a Labor Day when it was *snowing*. There were about a billion people hanging out on the beach and us kids were swimming. Of course!

2) Uh-huh… Teenage years. Maybe our Dr. Michigan was one of the Coast Guard guys who flew their helicopter low along the beach every morning when us *girls* were swimming in our bikinis [or more likely walking the beach in sweatshirts and shorts]. Oh, prob’ly not. But those of us who did not have indoor plumbing in our family cabin had to *bathe* in the lake (no we did not skinny dip — people around there had binoculars and telescopes, fer kee-reist). I’ll never forget one day when I got to my summer job for my 8:00 AM start time and Mr. D asking me if I had swum that morning. Yes. He laughed. I’d like to think that one of the reasons I got along so well there (besides the fact that I *owned* my work) was because I had enough gumption to *bathe* in the cold and sometimes turbulent waters of Gitchee Gumee at 7:00 AM or whenever and still get to work on time.

3) Now. The Commander put indoor plumbing into the Moomincabin eons ago. The Beach Urchins have never known the days of using the outhouse and bathing in the lake, although they do love to wash their hair in the lake when it is warm enough. It’s a rare day that I venture into Gitchee Gumme for an early morning swimming expotition any more. A shower is [arguably] less work. I do still swim up there. And. When the weather is favorable enough for an early morning kayak ride, I will often swim at the end of it.

Anyway, that’s our deck in the photoooo and I definitely did not swim in L. Superior over the weekend. At any time of day.

And hopefully, “Dr. Michigan” will either identify himself or go away.

* If you are a real person and your comment doesn’t show up, let me know! I never check what’s been caught in Akismet, so I have probably missed you.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 29th, 2011 at 5:51 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.