Wonder where I’ll go with this one. I spent *hours* today turning my brain inside out creating a single MS Word table. What does the report show if this, this, and that doohickey are assigned and this, that, and the other options are selected. Permutations anyone? And yes, I did it in Word. It’s [eventually] going into a long-*ssed Word document and it doesn’t calculate anything and I can make tables in any application so just bite me (as the Benevolent Despot has been known to say). In my neighborhood, we had devolved into talking about eating things like alligator, snake, and “squid” by the time I bailed out this afternoon. Yeah, I am out 🐽

So, npJane commented yesterday and said something about “gaylords”… … … Gaylords? I did a double-take. What the heck is she talking about? Did she fall victim to the beloved by some, dreaded by others, auto-correct? The Gaylord I know is a busy little city in the northern lower part of the Great Lake State. I have a long history with Gaylord.

First, on the many times my family drove from the Yooperland to Detroit or Ann Arbor on a Friday night, we would hit Gaylord right around dinner time. We ate at the Sugar Bowl restaurant (which is still around). Everyone ordered a steak sandwich, medium rare, with french fries(?). Coke for kids, beer for adults. Only one beer. We had many miles to go after Gaylord.

As a college kid, there was a Standard Oil gas station in Gaylord that I could always get good service at. I *think* that was before self-service became more or less universal and I would often take advantage of telling someone to “fill it up with regular!”. Once when I was driving north through one of our legendary Great Lake State Spring Break Ice Storms, the driver’s side veeeendsheeeeld viper on my crappy old Pinto wagon totally disintegrated about 10 miles south of Gaylord. I crept that 10 miles (everyone else was creeping too thank you god) and wouldn’t you know that the guys at the Standard station not only had a new veeeeendsheeeeld viper for me, they installed it for me at no charge. I only paid for the viper. $7.00.

Nowadays our beloved relatives, the UU (GG’S identical twin) and The Beautiful Gay actually live in Gaylord and we often stay at their beautiful, comfortable house when we are off on hiking adventures in the northern lower or just traveling through one way or the other, plus they let us store the Lyme Lounge in their huge garage for the winter. They are wonderful hosts and I love them. Gaylord is a major crossroads nowadays. It has WalMart and Meijer and Ulta and about a billion auto parts stores and restaurants that rival some of the best we have down here in the southeast part of the state. The Sugar Bowl is still a going concern but we usually eat elsewhere nowadays.

Gaylord has a kind of a twin city, Grayling, 30 miles or so to the south. As a kid who would often sit in the back of the car with a road map, those little cities were significant mile markers along our journeys up and down the I75 SUV Speedway. When I was in college, a friend of my brother and me would jokingly refer to Gaylord and Grayling as “Queer Nobleman and Old China Man” as we were driving north to home during spring break ice storms. Not politically correct jokes but also made by highly talented musicians who worked with and accepted folks of all descriptions. Alas, “we were only freshmen” There’s probably an ad, sorry. We weren’t exactly freshmen but we were very young and we so wanted to make the world better. Alas…

But gaylord means something different than the small northern Great Lake City that I am so familiar with and you can google that. And then there was “zarf” which I encountered in the NYT Mini xword today. I got it via the cross but what? Google “zarf” but know that little glubs perform the same function as a zarf if you are haaannngggging around at the farmers market early on a frigid Saturday morning.

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