Leelanau Whippersnapper

This was a fairly busy weekend.  Not at all what it should have been though.  Today is mothers day, last year was killer weather and sales were through the roof.  This year the weather sucked and we were dead most of the day.  It’s getting fairly obnoxious to hear people bitching about the gas prices lately.  Like my post yesterday, seems everyone doing the bitching are the people who are driving the big SUV’s and fucking monster trucks 50 miles one way to come and shop in red neck land.  We ALL pay the same price for gas folks, I don’t care how far you CHOOSE to drive, you made a choice now just fucking deal with it.

Tomorrow is Monday and what I hope is my “Friday”.  If all goes well, I should be out of work at noon and won’t have to go back until 10am on Thursday.  I tend to get shit on though when I start to look forward to something so I’m not going to get my hopes up that my plans won’t be shattered by my boss telling all of us we have to work 6 days this week.  I don’t normally have much of a problem with this except that I am really tired right now and would like a couple good days to just chill out.  We’ll see what happens.  The cherry blossoms are nearly out and Tuesday is supposed to be 70 degrees so I’m going for a drive to take pictures.  Look for an update on leelanauphotography.com in the next few days.

I’ve been doing some scanning lately and have added several new pictures from my boychoir days to the historical preservation albums on leelanauphotography.com.  Those albums are in the Family folder for those of you who care.  The one below was taken when I was in 8th grade in front of St. Cecilia Music Society in Grand Rapids.  It was the only time we made it to GR when I was in the choir.  This was in the middle of winter, take a look at that sweater I’ve got on.  I would LOVE to find a sweater like that today, we all had one and they were all hand made Icelandic sweaters that had been donated to the school years back.   I  have no idea if the school still has them but if anyone knows where I can find similar sweaters let me know.

As I’m sure you can tell from the picture, it was quite important to us that we looked good, hence the reason the stocking caps are barely clinging to our heads and our pea coats are not buttoned up even though it’s freezing cold outside.  I loved that time in my life but good lord I would never want to grow up again…

The following has been stolen from Wally’s Joke Mail and reposted here without permission.  I did not write these but I’m not sure Wally did either since I’ve seen these same things posted elsewhere.  Pay attention to the highlighted ones.  These are statements I find particularly disturbing and true in my neck of the woods.  Traverse City is not by definition a conservative area in the same way that Grand Rapids is but some of the back woods boys up here would sure like you to believe it’s all about American Flags and guns!

1. You have to be against abortion, but support capital punishment on demand.
2. You have to believe that governments create oppression and businesses create prosperity.
3. You have to believe that the man wearing a turban in the airport is more of a terrorist than the white man carrying a concealed gun.
4. You have to believe that federal funding is a handout and that disadvantaged people should be able to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” just like you and your daddy and his daddy before him.
5. You have to believe that someone made up global warming to scare you into not driving that gas-guzzling SUV.
6. You have to believe that being sexually confused is an abomination that God hates.
7. You have to believe that the people advocating those afflicted with AIDS should “stop whining.”
8. You have to believe that if schools don’t provide sex education and/or condoms, then kids just won’t think about sex and it will all just go away.
9. You have to believe that animal rights activists aren’t doing “what God intended,” but hunters are.
10. You have to believe that if someone has fallen on hard times it is their own fault and they should be given no help.
11. You have to believe that God lives in your own little box and that He hates all the same things and people you do.
12. You have to believe that the ACLU is bad because it supports certain parts of the Constitution, while the NRA is good because it supports certain parts of the Constitution.
13. You have to believe that the tax on your yacht is too high and that the homeless man isn’t being taxed enough.
14. You have to believe that the contributions to American history made by Caucasian men are more important than those made by women and African-Americans.
15. You have to believe that Black History Month is reverse racism, but the Confederate flag is just a historical symbol.
16. You have to believe that any war we fight is for a good reason, because the president said so.
17. You have to believe that God loves everyone, except for gay people.
18. You have to believe that this message is part of a crazy, left-wing revolution.

Some people are just irritating.  Others are just plain stupid.

The population is beginning to change now up here for the summer.  Today I pulled into The Coffee Bean to grab a cup of coffee on my way home from work and I had to park next to what I think was the BIGGEST SUV I’ve ever seen in my life.  It was the size of a small school bus, it was BRIGHT white (I hate white cars) and it was clearly driven by someone who cares nothing about how that vehicle makes them look when gas is now at $4.00 a gallon up here.  I would venture to say that the owner of that car has been made rich by the stupidity of others and is now showing off his ego. The only thing missing from this truck was a set of bulls balls for the hitch. (I don’t know who the woman is below, this is just to show you what bulls balls are).

Summer time up here brings with it some pretty crazy people.  Some even more so than the back woods meth-heads that populate the area in the winter.  These people have money, love to show it off, and care about nobody but themselves.  To the locals these people who come up here only on the weekends and then somehow think they live here are known as Fudgies…a horrendously bad nickname in the first place.  These are the folks who whistle at me at work in order to try and get my attention to help them.  Guess what folks, I don’t stop for people who whistle at me.  I’ll loose a sale before I am treated like that.  I’m not a dog, I don’t have a tail.  If you want to treat me like you would a dog than you had better have a treat for me in that fucking bag of yours or I’m going to jump on you, bite you and give you rabies you stupid fucks.  Pardon me, will you help me?.. works much better.

Part 2!  Tonight I decided that it was staying warm enough at night to move my cold frame greenhouse outside on to the deck.  I’ll still leave the cover on it especially at night but the grow lights are done now, it’s time for the sun to take over.  I’ve had some surprising results with this project.  I’ve got a huge planter now of fully blooming flowers just in time for transplanting.  Those are on the right side in the picture below.  Everything else I have is ready to go into the ground as soon as I feel it is staying warm enough not to kill everything.  I should be able to get things in early.  I spent the afternoon today digging up and weeding out my 2 garden beds down in the “pit”.  I never harvested my carrots last year and they were all over one of the beds.  Of course I had to clean out all the fucking cat shit from the roommates cat who has decided that my garden beds are fine places to take a shit.  Oh well, I suppose it could be worse.  Everything is still REALLY wet right now.  Things need to dry out a bit from all the rain we’ve have in the past couple days.  I’ve got a near lake in the backyard down in some of the low spots in the woods.  I’ve never seen that happen before.  I’m waiting for the water lilies to sprout, well actually it’s just going to spawn bugs.  Well tomorrow was supposed to be my day off but it’s the busy season.  I’ve got to go into work tomorrow to help clean.  Everyone is doing 6 day weeks now for the near future so the store stays in shape.  I won’t complain, it’s good money and I’ve got nothing going on here yet…it’s still too early to do much outside.  It’s the 6 day weeks in late July and August that I hate.  That’s MY busy time.

I’m a couple days late writing about it here but Dad and I got the dock in this past week.  The spring ritual was met with few problems, brand new waders for both of us so nobody got wet this year (thank God) and when it was done it was actually pretty straight.  I am hoping that this year will be the year that we finally put that last section of dock to use by getting some hardware and making an “L” at the end.  I think it would really increase the usable space and make it look pretty cool.  No idea on what it would cost though or how we could accomplish it since we would have to retro-fit that section to the old dock.  Next project is getting the boat in the water…hopefully we can get that done before the end of May this year.  Looks like I will have Memorial Day Weekend off this year.  That’s a first in several that I have not had to work.

Here’s a classic shot of the lake studs.

You know I get teased about my love of Elton John by none other than the same people I catch humming his tunes quietly to themselves time after time.  There are many things I enjoy about Elton John but mostly I enjoy the fact that he has such a huge volume of work AND he is continuing to create more.  I’ve really only just begun to explore his music, several months ago I purchased “The Fox” album which was a very early album of his.  There was one song on the album I wanted but I’ve really enjoyed the others on it as well.  Now I’ve recently become acquainted with his “Made in England” album due to a song called Blessed (click to listen).  It’s a very simple Lyric but a moving and a little haunting tune none the less.  I’m embarrassed to say but this song is on a regular rotation at work and is unfortunately interrupted each time by …SAVE BIG MONEY…that fucking jingle is genius.  If you live in the Midwest and don’t know that jingle, you are living under a rock.  Anyhow, I didn’t know it was an Elton song until just recently when I started to listen a little closer.  All his songs have certain phrases within the melodies that are easily attributed to his style.  There are very few artists out there who do this…it’s something that many artists out there today lack the skill to do I think.  Anyhow, I had to write and post the song here for you all to listen to.