Bad Dad makes a friend. YMP and Bad Dad on the shores of Lake Michigan. Or was that Crystal Lake? The Grand Duchess takes a selfie in her kayak. How NOT to impress the girls sunning themselves along the river. YMP and Bad Dad kayaking on the Platte River headed toward Loon Lake. J ust back from a week in Northern Michigan in a charming and spacious house on the banks of the Betsie River outside of Thompsonville. A largely pleasant seven days despite some challenging episodes with the Young Master, who has picked up some very questionable habits and language from his friends in the 8th Grade during the school year just ended. But otherwise, we enjoyed ourselves and contemplated remaining for a few days longer since the house was available. In the end, we decided to return home as planned originally since neither my wife, nor I wanted to spend the remaining days chained to our computers in Zoom meetings from our vacation destination. I actually managed to leave the laptop and ip
Here's a seasonal tune by the late Julie London (yep, Nurse Dixie on the old NBC TV series Emergency) from 1957. This is a song I had never heard before until my first December in Minneapolis (late 2000 saw a particularly frigid and snowy start to winter that year) at the University of Minnesota. During the last two weeks o the semester after Thanksgiving and Final Exam Week, I used to listen to the ex-KLBB on the radio, which had a nostalgia format (artists from the 1930s-1970s), and each December played nothing but old Christmas tunes for the entire month. This song turned up several times a day and in the evenings as I wrote my own final graduate papers, a final exam for my Norwegian 1001 students, and then graded everything. Anyway, whenever this tune came on the radio, it always brought to mind this crazy chick in my teaching assistant office who was preparing to defend her doctoral dissertation. She sat just two desks away and had the bluest eyes, freckles, and an intoxicating laugh. We spent that entire semester chatting about nothing much whenever we were in the office that we shared with six or seven other grad students. We later went skiing together one cold Saturday morning in February 2001 right before Valentine's Day (she invited me), spent the entire afternoon and evening talking at my place over hot tea and then Ukrainian food from Kramarczuk's Deli nearby until she had to go home late that night. We eventually got married in June 2006. So, this one is especially for my wife. . . The Grand Duchess. Here's I'd Like You for Christmas!
ReplyDelete