#RealityWednesday is our effort to bring reality back onto web. You know, the “other side” of all those glorious, fantastic, completely unrealistic posts you see on Facebook and Instagram, of people swimming in clear infinity pools in Italian seaside resorts, every day better than the next, not a care in the world. Sure, not a bad way to spend your life, but you’ll probably never see those stories on the Gazette. Unless I win the lottery… Nah, I’d probably just pay off the mortgage and go kayaking in East Bay.
See that photo of the cute squirrel at the top of this post? Cute, isn’t he? He’s a descendant of the infamous Mutant Squirrel we had running around here years ago. Or, I dunno. Maybe he IS Mutant Squirrel. I have no idea how long they live. They could be super human squirrel, for all I know. Anyway, he’s ridiculously pudgy. Not that my squirrel-feeding habit has anything to do with it.
Old Mission Gazette is Reader Supported.
Click Here to Keep the Gazette Going.
But here’s the thing. If you pan back out of the photo (see below), you can see the Big Picture. He’s sitting on top of an old entertainment center that got hauled out the front slider during the big “Mom’s House Clean-Out” adventure. After cleaning her house out, we realized it’d be comical to try and bring all of her stuff in here, without purging some of our own stuff.
So while the MSU student was here over the holidays, he made it his personal mission to get rid of all of our cheesy furniture and replace it with the better stuff that came from Mom’s house. But it’s the middle of winter in northern Michigan, when just getting up and down our driveway requires an act of God. So whatever got purged is still in the yard until some point in the future when we can hook up the trailer and haul everything away.
So to continue the story, the cheesy entertainment center went out the front slider. And by front slider, I mean the sliding door in our living room that faces the bay (the sliding door with no handle that doesn’t work right, but I’ll cover that in another #RealityWednesday). So the MSU student and his buddy, the other MSU student, dragged it out the door in the dead of night during a blizzard and there it sits. Right in the middle of the slider. Facing the bay. Where we look out the window every day.
Up til now, it’s been too snowy to try and move the thing from where it plopped, but now that we’re in the January Thaw, maybe we’ll get out there and at least move it to one side or the other, so we’re not looking at it directly in our view of the bay.
In the meantime, though, I decided to turn it into a squirrel feeder. Hey, it IS an entertainment center, after all. And those squirrels are very entertaining. Maybe I should craft those shelves into some sort of Squirrel Condo. Hmmm… the MSU student gave me a neat corncob squirrel feeder for Christmas… stay tuned…
A NOTE FROM JANE: I started Old Mission Gazette in 2015 because I felt a calling to provide the Old Mission Peninsula community with local news. After decades of writing for newspapers like the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, and magazines like Family Circle and Ladies' Home Journal, I really just wanted to write about my own community where I grew up on a cherry farm and raised my own family. So of course, I started my own newspaper. Because the Gazette is mainly reader-supported, I hope you'll consider tossing a few bucks my way if I mention your event, your business, your organization or your news item, or if you simply love reading about what's happening on the Old Mission Peninsula. Check out the donation page here. Thank you so much for your support. -jb
