Ahem, now that I have my reglear nucular tagger laptop back (and the trackpad isn’t even acting up, knock on wood big-time)…

There was no ytterbium at the Mitchell Street Pub. Or at Ace Hardware or Symon’s General Store or “that man’s shoe place” or Cutler’s or McLean & Eakin (award-winning Petoskey indie book store) or even The Long Skinny Art Store that I love but can never remember the name of. And (sshh, don’t tell Mouse) we didn’t get to the yarn store. Actually, there could’ve been ytterbium in any or all of those places for all I know about ytterbium, even though I looked it up on my handy dandy periodic table iPhone app. Some may (or not) want to know why a baggy old kayak woman has a periodic table app on her iPhone. Well. It is because you never know when you might *need* a periodic table at hand! Like yesterday morning, when we were hanging out at the Group Home at Houghton Lake watching the snow fall and eating cranberry pie and yer fav-o-rite blahgger was doing the dern Saturday NYT xword. A clue: atomic number of ytterbium. Uh… I asked the Mad Scientist and he had no idea (although he feigned knowledge that an element called ytterbium existed). I did *not* look up the answer but I eventually deduced that it was 70 via the number of letters and one or two crosses. So *then* I had to look it up. And of course, given that it was meeeee and the GG, that led to lots of discussion about IOS periodic table apps and some deleting and downloading, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.

Truth. I *loved* the periodic table when I was a kid in Sault Ste. Siberia. I loved drawing little models of atoms in the way we did in school back in those days. They looked like little solar systems with the protons and neutrons in the middle and electrons orbiting them. I used to imagine that there those nuclei were little worlds with people (or whatever). Something like that anyway. We never got anywhere near atomic number 70, aka ytterbium and I suspect things got a bit complicated long before then. I wonder how children are taught about the atomic structure of elements nowadays. I mean those children who are being taught actual science and not being taught that the earth was created 9000 years ago (or whatever). (Sorry, I couldn’t help throwing that in there…)

At any rate, we had an absolutely fabulous time with The Uncly Uncle and The Beautiful Gay and our beautiful daughter Lizard Breath. The UU and TBG are the best hosts on earth and I know that the GG did not want to leave today. And really, I didn’t want to leave either but I was antsy. Weather reports were iffy all over the map and I hate sharing the I75 SUV Speedway with a bunch of Dee-troit area SUV Yayhoo Cowboys in a snowstorm. And I wanted to get back to The Landfill and get a jump on the coming week.

We did have a wee bit of sharing a snowy road with *those people* today but once we came down out of the highlands of mid-northern Michigan, things improved considerably and even though we drove the last chunk of the trip under a weather map that showed frozen precipitation, it was not slippery at all. Cognitive dissonance? I have mixed feelings about weather maps. I well remember back in the days (not that long ago) when we would embark upon a winter trip with little or no idea what the weather would be. I think that’s still true at least some of the time. Like today.

Love love love the Great White North. Houghton Lake, Gaylord, Michaywe, Sault Ste. Siberia, The Moominbeach (and all of the Yooperland). (And Lopez…) But… Love love love being home home home here at The Landfill.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 9th, 2012 at 6:54 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.