Category Archives: michigan weather

life lately: hazy skies, skeins, and checking the air quality on repeat.

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last week

Last week was a lot of beautiful outdoor time – hours at our neighborhood pool club reading ‘Wedding People’ and ‘Villa Coco’ and ‘Dungeon Crawler Carl’ on my Kindle (all of these have been very different yet satisfying reads – and “Mongo is appalled!” – iykyk), miles of brilliant blue sky and sun, more reading on the front porch with the evening light sliding down over the hydrangeas and our hanging fern baskets, weeding the hostas and setting up the new river stone birdbath and photographing Brandon’s family lilies.

This week – not so much.

I’m sure everyone with a news app (or eyeballs) is aware of the Canadian wildfires which are sending smoke plumes across a wide swathe of the US. In Detroit, we’ve had the worst air quality in the world for at least one day and it looks like that beat goes on into the weekend. We’ve had a couple of summers where we’ve been impacted by wildfire haze, so it wasn’t especially surprising in theory, but yesterday when I stepped outside, I was shocked. I don’t ever remember the skies being this hazy, obscuring the sun to a vivid mere pinpoint, such an intense odor of burning.

Coupled with several days of high temperatures near 100, it’s been unpleasant. I’ve shifted to indoor activities in my after-work hours, reluctantly. Summers in Michigan are brief and therefore precious, and having to lose any of it has been a ding to my mental health this week (along with the constant barrage of terrible news – ICE murdering another person, diarrhea lettuce, the war). I’ve had to make extra efforts to stay positive and look on the bright side.

The heavy haze has put our hometown festival in jeopardy. While safety comes first, I’m thinking of the vendors and organizers who rely on this weekend or have spent numerous hours throughout the year planning it. I could still hear the valiant beer tent band last night (we live close to the heart of our small downtown) but with little improvement in the air quality, the attendance will probably be much lower than previous years. It’s our own tradition to run the small 5k they set up along the parade route, and then spend a few hours watching the parade and enjoying the community gatherings – the suffragette parasol drill team, the old-timey brass band on the city hall lawn. At the moment, those plans are up In the air.

Luckily the Tour de France is grinding away on Peacock and I have way too many knitting projects. I finished (!!!) my Perfect Knit t-shirt and wore it to work for the first time, and having that off the needles has given me mojo to keep pushing away on my kiddo’s Bug Collection scarf.

I also have a goal to knit up another pair of mittens or two using stash yarn, to help out one of my favorite local nonprofits. Mittens for Detroit, Inc., is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity that collects, purchases, and distributes new mittens and gloves to children, teens, and adults in need in Detroit and other underserved cities. On June 26, a pipe burst in their 100-year old building and they lost thousands of pairs of mittens, so in additional to making a donation to help them repair and start to replenish, I’d also like to add a couple of my own pairs. If you’d like to also support, their link is here.

It’s all a reminder that while I can’t control the weather, I can control (or work to manage, at least) how I adapt. Stay safe out there. Whether we are able to enjoy the festival as planned or stay tucked inside with books, the Tour, and WIPs, I hope your weekend brings a little peace and comfort.

how was your weekend? the unseasonably warm and wet edition

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How was your weekend? We had some very strange weather here in SE Michigan, even for what is occasionally a month of weather extremes. I can remember heat waves and wind storms and ice storms all occurring in Marches past. Sadly, a tornado touched down in Three Rivers (a little over two hours away from us) with a resulting loss of life.

So Saturday morning was muggy and grumbled with thunderstorms, which was fine with us because we had firm plans to stay in and watch one of the opening events of the cycling season (we are cycling fans here), the Strade Bianche, where wunderkind Tadej Pogacar devastated the field, the same as he did last year (and as he probably will in every race he starts for this year). I tried to make some progress on the kiddo’s bug scarf but the double knitting requires significant brain power and when cycling is on all I can manage is the most mindless garter stitch. So I mostly worked on my Cozy Comfort throw which will be a blanket that the kiddo can take to college.

The kiddo had a lot of homework and a paper to write and was holed up in the library or a coffee shop all weekend, so Brandon and I had an evening out for dinner and drinks. We don’t do this very often – we’re both early to bed folks – and as a result it felt like we were out quite late when in actuality we were home by 9. We set the clocks forward and so we still had energy to cuddle up with some snacks and get started on the Paul McCartney documentary “Man on the Run” (so much bad hair in the 1970’s).

It was a nice weekend together and although we lost an hour, we made the most of it. I hate this time change, being a person who has to adjust to the increased daylight (sort of a reverse SAD). It will probably make me feel a little off-kilter this week. I hope you were all able to enjoy a similarly cozy weekend with friends and family and fill your cups a bit in preparation for another week ahead.

pins of the week – midwinter break & winter back roads edition

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We took our planned midwinter break but abbreviated it by a couple of days due to the kiddo’s illness. It was a 4-hour drive to our rented cottage through Michigan winter and we drove through a variety of weather – warming melt, rain, fog, freezing rain, snow. Everything except frogs fell from the sky. The kiddo managed to get in a few hours of snowboarding, and Brandon did two full days of skiing. The strange weather continued and one afternoon the ski lifts closed for thirty minutes due to lightning – a crazy contrast to last year’s trip when we were skiing in temperatures dipping into the teens Fahrenheit.

Light on the ski hills; the drive; our favorite ‘up north’ craft beer in the cottage hot tub; exploring local bookstore and coffee shop when the kiddo felt too tired to snowboard

So the drives there and back were stressful and yet compelling. I find the starkness of Michigan winter roads beautiful. I grew up among them. They can be bleak and sometimes despairing but since my Pinterest board has filled up with images that brought that same feeling, even if they are not technically Michigan made or inspired, I’ll let you decide for yourself whether they appeal.

Original pin here
Original pin here
Original pin here
Original pin here
Original pin here

As always, a bonus cat thank you for reading until the end!

october weather

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October has felt like a summer month with very little autumn yet. There is a general dusty draining of color – so far, not a lot of vibrancy. The temperatures are still well above normal. 

Head down in the busy season of calendar appointments and activities, planning and budgeting and the day to day work that builds a life, it’s easy to miss these things. So I am trying to remember to notice.

Sometimes I look out my bedroom window and notice the maple turning orange. And on my way out to my car after work, past the retaining pond, the crows watch me from their ragged line in the reeds. They talk amongst themselves and in their voices I hear the slate grey sky and the hard frost and the black bare branches. 

“Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.” – Daniel Kahneman

dispatch from a northern weekend

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Seeking the snow last weekend, our first stop was my mom’s house – almost 4 hours north, on the west side of the state. Snow was knee-high (conservative estimate). Brandon and I woke up Saturday morning to run the Betsie Bay Frozen 5k, which is one of my favorite events. It hasn’t been run since 2020, before the world shut down. In the olden days I would have posted a full separate race recap with my time but in today’s world, post-50 years old, having survived a pandemic, menopause, teenage kid years, the Orange Menace and his Nazi cohorts attempting to ruin democracy as we know it, and various other life events, just getting out there and running it is enough.

We then drove 2 hours further north, to the village of Walloon Lake, which is most famous for being young Hemingway’s Michigan playground. We found a historical marker, and there’s a statue of him somewhere around, but the wind was blowing fine snow into whiteout conditions everywhere so we gave up looking. Instead, we skied at Boyne Mountain (the kid snowboarded) and enjoyed our perfect little Vrbo. As we get older, my ability to stay in a hotel has decreased significantly. I hate being cheek to jowl with mass humanity, having to either pay for every meal and snack or rely on hotel coffee and crumpled snack bags. Give me an AirBnB or a Vrbo every time. I know they’re wreaking havoc on small communities but selfishly I want exactly what we had this weekend. Which was a cozy cottage on a private lot with a fireplace, hot tub, separate bedrooms for us and the kid, a beautiful living space and kitchen, fully appointed. We cooked, we had good coffee, we had a fire, we watched movies, read books, I knitted, and we had privacy. I threw caution to the wind and ate what I wanted to eat, drank Horny Monk from the Petoskey Brewing Company, and made a fool out of myself on the slopes. (I fell. A lot.) The snow was almost claustrophobic – piled higher than street signs and just continually sifting down. The drifts outside the Vrbo were up to the windows with paths cut into them to access doors and the driveway – if you don’t have a snowplow or a snowblower running constantly, you would have big trouble.

All in all, it was a perfect swift getaway with my two favorite people. The world is hard right now and being away for a bit is a luxury. We don’t have a lot of travel planned for the year, so the times we do have together will be all the more important.

a few good things

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  1. I bought a cinnamon broom for the den and it smells sooo autumnal.
  2. It has been a very hot and dry month in Michigan yet this evening we are sitting here with the windows open listening to a gentle cool rain.
  3. I just finished a fantastic creepy book – one of the best books I’ve read this year, I think – highly recommend “Mexican Gothic” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. It was EXCELLENT. So atmospheric with a heroine you immediately are staunchly behind and the most chilling and fascinating setting. I’ve just picked up another by her (“Gods of Jade and Shadow”).
  4. We spent all day yesterday at the first marching band competition of the year. Unfortunately it was 85 degrees with a blazing sun on a high school football field with zero shadow (and zero parking which meant street parking blocks away). Wool uniforms are still de rigueur and if we parents in the stands were red faced and running with sweat then the kids were truly suffering. But I love a good marching band and so I was deeply satisfied and even more so when our kids won second place in Class A competition, best percussion, best color guard, and best in music!
  5. Next week is Homecoming. Insert happy face emoji surrounded by hearts.

I need a few good things today because I have a case of the Sunday Scaries. My beloved boss has moved up and out of Widget Central and I am left with a mass of complex tasks, exponentially increasing workload, and instability. I keep telling myself it isn’t my first time at this rodeo but – let me bury my nose in a gothic horror novel and a delicious cinnamon broom for a bit longer, okay?

weekend plans

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A few august highlights

What’s everyone up to for the long US holiday weekend? I’m off today so it will be a nice 4 days for me. I haven’t taken one long vacation this summer, just a few long weekends, which have been welcomed. This week felt like a really long one with storms and a power outage one day as well as the kid’s first marching band performance at the first home football game. (I don’t like the early season games – it’s so fricking hot and last night the stadium was almost as full of bees and wasps as it was half-dressed hormonally charged teens.)

The kid started school on Monday which feels weird to me as a Gen-Xer who always started school after Labor Day. Lots of memories of that last sad Labor Day weekend (possibly spent watching the Jerry Lewis telethon on my grandparents’ screen porch) which I usually couldn’t enjoy because of the looming back to school jitters. However she has today off so assuming she gets up in time we’re going to do some back to school shopping. Otherwise, this weekend I want to get a couple of runs in, have breakfast with my bestie tomorrow, and do some cleanup in the yard. We still have lots of branches down from the storms.

Oh and my knitting mojo ramps up as we near the ‘-ber’ months. Finished a pair of socks for the kid and have pulled out another sock wip to hopefully make good progress on this weekend – maybe listening to my current audiobook “The Villa” by Rachel Hawkins.

Hope everyone has a very safe and happy Labor Day.

It feels so good to post a finished object! These are the “Vanilla Socks on 9” Circulars” which is a fantastic pattern by Kay Litton aka Crazy Sock Lady. The yarn is Knitting Lizard Fibers Super Soft Sock (75% superwash merino & 25% nylon) in the “Carlson’s Fishery” colorway which was a special offering via Wool & Honey’s Sleeping Bear Yarn Club.

musing on spring

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The calendar says spring and although the weather is mild, I am suspicious. We’ve gotten some of our most punishing weather in March. The worst, probably, came a few years ago, when we had a windstorm that uprooted the neighbor’s massive pine and left me without power for three days – three days in which the temperatures plummeted to the single digits.

The spring holidays are my least favorite. They seem gaudy and false. There is a deep aura of melancholy to them. Even more since my father passed away in March, celebrations in the spring feel hollow when the world is working so hard to bloom again. In comparison, the autumnal holidays Halloween and Thanksgiving feel so much more festive. They come as a welcome relief, the end of another year. We celebrate the going of the light, put our masks on to scare death, we harvest and we gather with loved ones in the comfort of our homes to eat and give thanks. It’s always been easier for me to celebrate the culmination of a hard effort than the commencement of one. And spring always feels like a hard beginning, much harder than the dwindling season into winter.

dress shopping, post-Covid, and a warm fall.

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I am happy to report that at long last, I feel mostly recovered from my dust-up with Covid. I’m trying to get rid of the lingering fatigue and miasma in my lungs and head but have my smell and taste back, am back to running (slow, snotty, and wheezy), and I am feeling about a thousand percent better. It was no joke, though, and took me down for longer than any illness I’ve had in the last few years, so again, I highly recommend boosting and taking it seriously.

Otherwise, we’ve been chugging along with marching band season, which hasn’t been as all-consuming this year due to fewer home games. Between that and Covid, I’ve only been to one tailgate and I”ll miss the first marching competition next Saturday because we have tickets to ‘Funny Girl’ at the Fisher Theater in Detroit (purchased before the competition schedule was released). The kiddo has a date to Homecoming in early October (!!) so we had to go dress shopping. The last one she tried on was the winner and is quite an elegant little number, black lace over a nude silk sheath, with little off-the-shoulder straps. She’s going to look like a million bucks, very Old Hollywood, but as a mom it is still gobsmacking to see how SMALL all the dresses are. I told a friend on Facebook that I think they could make 3 of today’s dresses out of 1 of ours from the 1980’s / early 90’s.

We booked our Spring Break – yes, it seems early but after forcing the kid to go to Colonial Williamsburg last year, I’d promised her a trip somewhere warm for next spring. We are going to the Bahamas! For 5 nights and 4 days which already stresses me out a little bit (thinking about being away from home that long) but which I’m sure will be an amazing trip.

The weather in Michigan has been very warm and summery, sunny days with highs in the upper 70’s and cool nights, lather rinse repeat. It shows no signs of cooling off anytime in the next 10 days which is nice, but I really am craving some crisp weather, frost on the pumpkins, and some storms to usher in the cozy season. There’s nothing worse than traipsing around a cider mill or pumpkin patch when it’s 80 degrees and you are sweating and there are bees in your cider.