My little brother brought home a French-English dictionary from the free table at the college library. The dictionary was printed in Chicago in 1943 by the Wilcox & Follett Co. As you are probably aware, 1943 was smack dab in the middle of the United States’ involvement in WWII. So, being the nerd that I am, I decided to look at what other books had been published by that company in the same year.
My attention was immediately captured by the title “Scuttlebutt Goes to War” by Margaret Friskey. I knew I had to find it.
My search turned out to be easier than I anticipated. The book is considered public domain and is available to read on the Internet Archive.
The book is based on a real dog named Scuttlebutt who lived on board a Navy ship during the war. It is a cute little story with a happy ending.
The illustrations, done by artist Lucia Patton, add to the cuteness of the book.
Now for my problem: There’s a sequel. It’s called “Scuttlebutt and the Carrier Kitten” and I can’t find it for free anywhere. I don’t really have enough disposable income to pay $30+ to buy it. Though don’t get me wrong; I am tempted.
In the meantime, I will content myself with reading other things. My oldest nephew gave me a murder mystery for Christmas, and I’ve been meaning to get started on it.
Pictures cannot do this hill justice. It is located in Victory Park in Albion, MI. It is by no means the best sledding I’ve ever experienced, but it is the best sledding in the area that I know of. It is a good height, as you may be able to tell from the cars on the road near the bottom.
The sled that I keep in my car is one of the ones I grew up with. It is probably around 35 years old, and is my favourite sled to use. I’ve tried to use newer saucer sleds, and they break too easily and are too rounded on the bottom, so they don’t pick up the same speed. I have a couple of your more standard long sleds as well, but there is something about the lack of control as you hurtle downhill that adds to the excitement.
The hill starts with a steep drop, just steep enough to make you wonder if this is a good idea. (The permanent “sled at your own risk” sign posted by the hill doesn’t help.) Just as it first starts to flatten out, there is another steep drop, so the resulting speed sends you hurtling across the field.
The snow was just the right depth so that it sprayed up into your face as you slowed to a stop.
It was absolutely exhilarating. I went up and down the hill until I was on the verge of an asthma attack, and if it weren’t for that, I would have kept on going.
It’s starting to warm up a bit. We’ve made it into the double digits!
We managed to jumpstart my car, and so far it seems to be keeping its charge.
Yesterday was a bad day all around for cars. One of my younger sisters ran out of gas in the next town over. Ironically, I was the one to go and rescue her.
Pro tip: Don’t accidentally spill gasoline on your hand in sub-zero weather. You will almost immediately lose all feeling in those fingers and experience intense pain warming them back up. Even now there’s still a little bit of numbness.
I did have some lovely ham and rice soup for supper.
It’s snowing now. The snow is absolutely beautiful and well worth the trouble of the last few days. I am hoping it will snow enough that I can go sledding this week.
Fun fact about me: I always travel with a sled in my car. If the opportunity for sledding suddenly arises, I am prepared.
Temperatures the last couple of days could be described as “chilly.”. While in some ways it’s nice, it reminds me of my time living in the U.P.; in other ways it is not so great.
My car won’t start. I’m hoping it will once the weather warms back up a little, but that does nothing to ease my current stress levels. The battery is only two years old, so it shouldn’t be having too many problems.
My other complaint goes back to the living in a really old house thing. My bedroom doesn’t have heat. I have managed to get my room up to a balmy 41°F.
Hamlet is mostly refusing to go outside unless he absolutely has to, which means that he woke me up at 3:00 this morning desperately needing to poop, having refused to do so all day.
Sulking because I made him go outside to pee before bed
With my whining out of the way, a couple of things I am enjoying about the cold:
Cozying up in my bed with Hamlet, an electric blanket, and some freshly microwaved Warmies has been nothing short of delightful.
There’s nothing like hot soup on a cold day.
Pumpkin soup with pumpkin pasta
There are always going to be bad things. Something will go wrong; you can always find something to complain about. But you can’t let it be all you focus on.
Find the things you’re thankful for, the little reasons to enjoy life. If you can’t find any, make some.
Saturday night I went to the Sauk Theatre Annual Business Meeting.
Those of you who have been to business meetings before may currently be thinking that that does not sound like a fun night out, but actually it’s an event that I try not to miss.
I have a long history with the Sauk. I worked stage crew for my first show back in 2010 and did 30-some shows with them from 2010 to 2017. I had a variety of roles, from running the lights to being onstage to being a playwright. It was a huge part of my teen and young adult years and fundamentally changed who I am as a person and how I see the world.
While the above is certainly enough to make me want to support them, it is not the main reason I go to the annual meeting. At the Sauk Annual Meeting it is more than just business; they break up the meeting with performances from the previous year’s shows, as well as a sneak peek of the first show of the coming year.
It’s hard to be bored by budget reviews when they are sandwiched between a comedic interrogation and a thrilling musical number.
This does mean it is the longest business meeting that I attend all year; last night’s ran for 2 hours and 45 minutes.
Living in a 160-year-old house is no picnic. When we first moved in we were greeted by a dead bat on the windowsill; a grim omen of what we would experience for the past twenty years.
At the start we had bats flying around inside the house on a weekly basis. It was such a big problem that, despite the fact they’re a protected species, we often had to resort to catching and killing them. This did little to stem the tide.
A few fun facts we’ve learned about bats since moving into that house:
One- On average, brown bats live about 7-8 years, but they can live up to 30 years in the wild. If you have bats living in your house, they’re not going anywhere anytime soon.
Two- In the winter they enter a state called “torpor” which helps them conserve energy and survive colder temperatures. In torpor a bat’s heartrate will decrease from about 210 beats per minute to about 8 beats per minute. This allows their body to cool so that they are not expending energy trying to regulate their body temperature. Torpor may also extend to become hibernation, with some bats hibernating for up to 90 days at a time.
Three- Bats are social creatures, roosting in colonies for a large portion of the year. In the winter, bats will roost together to hibernate. In the spring and summer, pregnant females will roost together in “maternity colonies” (basically a giant mom group) while the males and non-pregnant females roost alone or in smaller groups.
Four- Little Brown Bats are an endangered species. While they have very few predators (a lot of other animals think they taste bad), they are very susceptible to a disease called “White-nose Syndrome”. This is a fungal infection that was first identified in 2006, and has since killed millions of bats, in some areas killing off as much as 90% of wild populations.
In 2008 my youngest brother was born. This was a wonderful thing, but stressful. He was born premature by about three and a half months, so when he finally came home from the hospital he was hooked up to monitors, oxygen tanks, feeding tubes, and all sorts of fun things. Unfortunately, this meant that when bats suddenly appeared in the house, it was almost impossible to pick up the newborn and take him to safety while the bat was dealt with.
Toby at 9 Months
So what did we do? After a couple months of research and begging, our father finally said that we could get a cat. One cat, and only if it caught the bats.
We gave him two kittens for his birthday.
Our bat problem was finally in check. One of the kittens, named Algernon (Algie for short), was a fierce hunter. The other kitten, named Guess, was a delight, but sadly we lost her after only a couple of years.
Algie protected the house for years, and we would see bats maybe once or twice a year instead of once or twice a week. But all good things come to an end so they say. Not to worry, Algie is doing just fine, but at 17 years-old he would rather lounge around yelling at Hamlet than hunt anything.
Not the most recent photo, but he had intentionally stretched his legs as far as he could to keep from having to share the window with Hamlet.
So the bats are back. Not to the volume we had them before, but more than we want. I spent far too long the other night crawling around on the floor duct-taping the cracks under the baseboards to keep them out.
The house isn’t in good enough condition for us to bother trying to fix it, much less pay for pest control. At this point we just want to keep it standing long enough to pay off the mortgage and find a new house. The goal is three years, but who knows what’ll happen.
In the meantime, we fall asleep to the not very soothing chirps and squeaks of the North American Brown Bat.
I love to reread books. I love to rewatch movies and TV shows. I think that if you enjoyed it once, why only enjoy it once.
To start off the new year, I decided to reread “Airman” by Eoin Colfer. If you have never read this before, I highly recommend it. If you haven’t read it in a while, I highly recommend reading it again.
Adventure, intrigue, aeronautics. What more could you ask for?
I have read this book countless times over the years, and every time it still holds up to my expectations.
Last night I spent far too much time chopping up one of my bedsheets to make a shirt. Or maybe I spent just the right amount of time.
It was my first time sewing a shirt, and only my second time sewing something with sleeves (the first time being a 17th-century shift for my Ren Faire costume). I am inordinately pleased with the results, though I know it’s not perfect.
Terrible mirror selfie with a bonus drive-by photobomb from Hamlet
I used the top sheet from my flannel set that I use in the winter.
My summer set has dragons and knights on it.
I pretty much exclusively buy my sheets from the children’s section, a tactic that I highly recommend. When the dragon sheets wear out, I am considering replacing them with sharks.
But back to the shirt. I made the pattern from another shirt that I already owned and love to wear. It’s getting kind of worn, so I wanted to find a way to preserve the comfort that I feel when wearing it while also upgrading to a more fun fabric.
As previously stated, I am ridiculously pleased with how it turned out. While it was intended for use as a pajama shirt, I already suspect it may occasionally cross the boundary into daywear.
I’m afraid I may have caught a bit of a crafting bug as a result of last night; I am looking around my house, and all I see are materials.
Let me know if you can think of any fun uses for a broken coffee maker, three copies of the same book, and a very ugly Christmas gnome.
I used to devour books like they were the only thing giving me life.
I still love books and reading; these days it just feels like I don’t have the time and energy needed to sit down and focus on a book long enough to finish it. I was starting to think that I had changed too much; maybe I wasn’t a reader anymore? But then I went on vacation.
It was nothing big, just a week off work spent in the Appalachian Mountains in Tennessee. After a couple of days of just existing without having to stress and work, I read a whole book in one sitting, just like I was 10 years old again.
I thought I had lost it, and I was right, but not for the reasons that I thought. What I thought was my brain being fundamentally changed by growing up and spending more time working with computers was actually just me starting to burn out.
In 2025 I want to read more, but to use it as a measurement of improvement. If I go through a whole month without finishing at least one book, then I have to step back, figure out where my energy is going that it maybe shouldn’t be, and make changes accordingly.
In 2025 I want to be happier and healthier, and I want to be able to look back at the end of the year and see if I actually was better than I was last year.
Photo taken by Naomi at Laurel Falls off the Appalachian Trail near Hampton, Tennessee.
Bright Walls was a public art and mural festival founded and run by volunteer members of the Jackson Young Professionals from 2018-2022. The festival hosted artists from across the world, bringing 75 world-class murals to the downtown district of Jackson, Michigan. Though the festival has ended, the murals are still there for people to see and enjoy, hopefully for years to come.
I chose a chilly Sunday morning to walk around downtown Jackson and see the murals for myself, something I had been meaning to do for some time and just never gotten around to.
There was very little traffic on the roads, and I think I was the only foot traffic that morning; 20°F weather is not everyone’s cup of tea.
The murals were gorgeous and well worth the cold walk. I loved discovering new works of art around every corner; it was like a very colourful scavenger hunt.
Jellyfish mural by Zach Snyder of Jackson, Michigan. Portrait mural by Detour of Denver, Colorado.
The murals added so much to the area; I don’t normally enjoy the city, but I absolutely loved exploring that part of Jackson. I love to see people taking things that would normally be overlooked and making them into something beautiful.
Mural by Irene Lopez Leon of Barcelona, Spain.
I stood and stared at every mural I came across until I was too cold to keep standing still. Every artist brought something different and unique, and every one spoke to me in a different way.
Mural by Insane 51 of Athens, Greece.
If you ever visit Jackson, I highly recommend setting aside a couple of hours to walk around downtown and explore the Bright Walls murals.
Mural by Kevin Burdick of Flint, Michigan.
I really genuinely wish that I could experience this more often. I wish that this was not a unique experience and that every city that I went to was covered in artwork.
Mural by Erin Miller Wray of Los Angeles, California.
I cannot describe in words the delight that I felt upon turning a corner and glancing across the street to see a giant pigeon staring down his nose at me.
Mural by Adele Renault of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
I was particularly determined to find the mural done by Rhiannan Sibbald. We met when she was hired to do a mural at Kids ‘N’ Stuff Children’s Museum in Albion, MI. I love her work; she has a focus on bold colours and happy, optimistic images and messages.
Mural by Rhiannan Sibbald of Sault St. Marie, Michigan.
I hope that someday I get the chance to contribute something to make the world a more beautiful place. I think that’s all most people really want: to not just leave a mark that says, “I was here,” but to leave something that says, “I mattered,” no matter how small it is.
Snug Slug Activities 