Boomtown.

I was 16 when I first set foot in the state of Michigan, and bypassed the lower peninsula altogether. We headed across the bridge, to my friends’ cottage in the Les Cheneaux Islands, high up in Lake Huron, off the eastern Upper Peninsula coast. Of course we stopped a few times in the nine hours or so it took to drive from Columbus, and we almost always stopped at Gaylord.

“Last chance for gas before the bridge,” someone would say. It’s about 50 miles south of the Mackinac Straits. Even though we’d been in the pine-trees-and-blue-skies north for at least 100 miles, Gaylord was the final turn before the home stretch.

(That the islands, and the cottage, were 45 minutes beyond the bridge didn’t matter. Once you crossed, you were as good as there.)

Gaylord was also the stop, going home, where you filled up and got junk food for the interminable, party’s-over trip home. My friend Paul, the party king, was famous for driving to Gaylord, getting a shoebox full of fries or bag of donuts at some drive-through, turning the wheel over to someone else and crashing for a carb nap in the back seat.

Anyway, while I don’t know Gaylord, I know its two freeway exits pretty well. After Alan and I got together, we started traveling to Grayling, about 15 miles south, and Gaylord faded into my past.

So on Sunday, I’m starting my trip home, hunger is starting to gnaw, and Covid or no Covid, northern Michigan was packed. Long lines at any sit-down restaurant, drive-ins and patios packed, and even McDonald’s in St. Ignace had a drive-through line backed up onto U.S. 2.

I crossed the bridge and tried Mackinaw City. Same story. So I got back in the car and figured, it’s Spike’s Keg o’ Nails in Grayling, then. As I approached Gaylord, I started seeing signs for lots of places to eat. Lots of them. It was a Five Guys sign that caught my eye; Five Guys aren’t exactly confined to Manhattan, but they’re usually located pretty far from little towns up north in Michigan.

So I took the usual fast-food exit and hooooly shit, this town has grown. There was not only fast food, but craft brewers, outdoors shops and lots of touristy stuff, but not overwhelmingly so. And this was just on one strip.

The answer was? Jobs, of course:

McComb said Gaylord is booming because it positioned itself to be ready after the economic downturn of 2007-08. Gaylord reeled when the Georgia-Pacific plant closed in 2006, eliminating 200 jobs.

McComb said the city has been able to attract employers and development because the city made itself attractive.

“We had a thriving community throughout the downtown and had things in place like an industrial park and another new industrial park, and infrastructure that we invested in in the downturn,” she said. “We really are a community where someone looking to invest can find an existing building or land to do it really quickly.”

I’m reminded of something someone said in an interview I did in northern Michigan once upon a time: “You want to change someone’s life up here? Give them a job.”

Other revelations from the trip: Radio has been entirely taken over by religious entities; I couldn’t find NPR to save my life. I did hear an interview with Salena Zito, the Trump whisperer on Relevant Radio, some Catholic network. She declared that Hollywood, New York and Washington are “all one big zip code” who dictate what the rest of us see and hear and…I turned it off. You had your time to cash in, honey. Once Trump is gone, you’ll just be another very low-rent Peggy Noonan, at one-tenth the salary, if that.

But it was a very pleasant trip, and when I got home? I got laid off. From one of my jobs; I remind you, I have two. They said it was for budgetary reasons, not performance, offered the usual letter of recommendation, all that. I’m…fine with it. Seriously. It was never the best fit, but it was important work. Deadline has more of an element of fun, and that’s the one that remains. I’m close enough to the end of my career that I could probably retire now, although I’d rather not do it abruptly. I’ll look for something else, and we shall see. Serenity now.

Tomorrow: Primary election. The day after that: Training for census work. I may not be back until week’s end. Enjoy yours.

Oh, wait. Before I go, I was calculating driving time to my election assignment tomorrow and found the Google Street View of my house. Alan made an appearance:

He was watering the ferns.

Posted at 8:30 pm in Same ol' same ol' |
 

64 responses to “Boomtown.”

  1. Joe Kobiela said on August 3, 2020 at 8:53 pm

    Best of luck on the job search, glad you still have the other gig and imagine the U.P was a slice of heaven.
    Reporting for duty at Detroit city airport Tuesday around 2 PM stop by and say hi.
    Pilot Joe

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  2. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on August 3, 2020 at 10:23 pm

    Definitely didn’t plan on celebrating turning 59 by dropping my income by 75%, but I’m thankful for the 25% that’s still left . . . then my supervisor asked me by email over the weekend if I could come in this morning, and I’ll admit to having my heart somewhere around my epiglottis. It was only to learn when she’s planning on taking early retirement, as we sort out what I might do this fall to bump my hours up a bit there.

    Freelance writing gigs certainly have dried up, though.

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  3. LAMary said on August 3, 2020 at 10:36 pm

    I was supposed to go into the office of my new employer today for training and to pick up my laptop, phone, etc. I went in but the guy who was supposed to do my training was remoting today, so they sent me home with all my hardware to set up and have a zoom meeting with him. I liked my supervisor. She and I chatted for an hour or so at the office and I liked the guy who trained me although two hours on Zoom was fairly tedious. So I solo tomorrow. Send all your epidemiologist friends to me.

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  4. beb said on August 4, 2020 at 1:46 am

    “Watering the ferns.” Is that what you call it? We used to call it peeing in the fencerow.

    I’m one of those people who needs a pit stop before chancing the Mackinaw Bridge. Driving over a mesh steel span that high in the sky is … pants wetting.

    On a drier note I should check that web site to see if my mail-in ballot arrived.

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  5. Dexter Friend said on August 4, 2020 at 4:53 am

    We always ate breakfast at The Sugar Bowl Restaurant in Gaylord. Food was sort of like Richard’s Restaurants of Indiana.
    When I made my first trips up north, I thought the town was GAY-lord. Nope. “Gale-urd”. If you’ve been up north, you know what a pasty is, too. It’s a “hand pie” , a flaky crust stuffed with meat and peas and gawd knows what all. A good one is dee-lish; a bad one will make you wanna ralph. One of the best, friendliest establishments was The Keyhole Bar in Mackinaw City. I stopped in there every time I went up north until I plugged the jug in 1992. I always drank Labatt’s Blue in there. Until I wore it down to ripped threads, my favorite tee shirt had a cartoon on the back. Motel room…man with pick-up girl, the girl saying “You naughty boy! I said the KEYhole!”…your imagination tells you what the guy was doing with…well…. And a shout out to Murdick’s Fudge of Mackinaw City and Mackinac Island . I loved that stuff.

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  6. ROGirl said on August 4, 2020 at 5:09 am

    They can’t not screw up my firing. When the grim reaper called me on Friday, she told me they would pay my cobra for a month, but that I had to fill out the form and send it back (that’s why they did this at the end of the month). She let me know that some people don’t confirm the cobra coverage, I said I am good at taking care of things like that. She asked me about my personal email, she had it wrong and I corrected it.

    I waited for her email. It still wasn’t there yesterday. I was about to send her an email asking about it, and there was an email from the HR assistant asking if I had received the severance package the GR sent on Friday. Maybe they will send it to the correct email address today.

    I also have to go to the office to clean out my desk. And I have a company laptop. Presumably there was information about those things in the email I didn’t get. And before they cut off my network access, she sent out an email to everyone announcing that I had been let go, along with one other person. When she was on the phone with me, she let me know that she had one more person she needed to call and fire that morning.

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  7. Dorothy said on August 4, 2020 at 7:13 am

    ROGirl that is just horrifying – how many people does it take to type/write out an email address correctly?! A smart person would send you one while still on the phone with you to make sure they got it right. OR have you send THEM an email from that account so they have it that way. This is not rocket science.

    So of course I had to Google my address via street view. Ugh. Our old garage doors, old shrubs that we took out at least 5 years ago, and a wrinkled up blue tarp sitting next to a little green lawn spreader. How often do they re-take those Google photos? I hope they make some public announcement so I can go and vamp for the camera – and make sure there are no blue tarps and lawn spreaders cluttering the driveway.

    Sorry about your job, Nancy. I seem to be saying that to more and more people these days. The young woman across the street from me whose husband was so threatening and awful to her a few weeks ago also just lost her job. I’m not sure what she did for a living, but I hope she finds something. She’s got a daughter turning 6 tomorrow and a 15 year old who just moved in with them a couple months ago. I’m guessing it was a shared custody situation and now she has him until he’s 18…? Her husband is in the psych ward of the VA thank goodness.

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  8. alex said on August 4, 2020 at 7:34 am

    Hosing the hostas. I usually do it at night. And Google hasn’t done a street view of our house because we’re tucked away in a place that’s so overlooked that you can’t even find incident reports for our neighborhood on the county police department web site, though incidents do happen.

    Google has overhead shots of our neighborhood. These get updated every few years and the latest one looks to be from about 2-3 years ago judging by the old dock and boats on our shoreline, now replaced. You can’t see the house through the trees unless you view it in 3D and everything takes on a kind of cartoonish look and even then you only see snippets.

    No need to hose the hostas this week. The deluges of the past few days ought to keep them daisy-fresh for the rest of the year.

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  9. Suzanne said on August 4, 2020 at 8:25 am

    In a bizarre year, this is about par for the course. Jerry Falwell, Jr and the yacht party incident.

    https://relevantmagazine.com/current/jerry-falwell-jr-posted-then-deleted-a-bizarre-vacation-photo-from-instagram/

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  10. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on August 4, 2020 at 8:30 am

    Dexter, the mystery key ingredient in pasties would be rutabaga. You can go with just potato, but a long simmered root vegetable is the bulk to stretch out the meat for those impoverished Cornish tin miners who moved to da UP.

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  11. kayak woman said on August 4, 2020 at 8:52 am

    I listen to CMU’s NPR station (when I don’t have satellite on) from about Flint to Sault Ste. Marie. It’s all over the place and I have the station numbers pretty much memorized after all these years. Used to get dinner at the Sugar Bowl as a kid when my family made trips from the Sault to Ann Arbor or Detroit. Lots more restaurant choices in Gaylord now.

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  12. jcburns said on August 4, 2020 at 9:12 am

    As Kayak Woman says, the CMU stations are literally all over the dial. Hey, look, a handy accurate-ish chart:

    https://www.infoplease.com/culture-entertainment/tv-radio/michigan-npr-member-stations

    (And of course near the Sault and Detroit, you can listen to those fine Canadian CBC stations, which are like NPR with accents.)

    Sorry about the layoff Nancy. Their loss, of course.

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  13. Deborah said on August 4, 2020 at 9:15 am

    I have only been to the UP once, it got down in the 30s one of the nights we were there. We also drove up in to Canada, that was the first time I’d ever been out of the country. That trip was with my dad and my sister, I was 19.

    This is day 6 after our Covid tests, I have to wait until after 9 to check the website to see if our results are in the system. I still don’t trust the website though, it seems busted. I tried calling but of course just got voice mail. I feel sorry for those folks they’re probably doing the best they can and then some, but that doesn’t stop me from being aggravated as hell. It didn’t have to be this way.

    Have any of you seen the Jonathan Swan interview with Trump? As usual Trump looks and sounds crazy. I wonder why he keeps doing those.

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  14. Deborah said on August 4, 2020 at 9:26 am

    The woman in that weird Jerry Falwell photo has an odd hairdo in juxtaposition with her outfit. The his and hers pants undone is bizarre. And what is black water? Is that a thing?

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  15. LAMary said on August 4, 2020 at 9:34 am

    I’m working, yay, but CA Unemployment still owes me back payments from the months when I was waiting. They started paying me minimum plus the fed’s 600 and, then sent an extra chunk of cash with no explanation,then went back to minimum plus 600. I’ve been trying to get an explanation of why I got many weeks of minimum. After six emails I got two replies, one saying they’re working on it and another telling me to patient. There were many attempts at getting someone on the phone between early June and last week. That was a pointless exercise. I’d really like the 3k or so that I should have received.

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  16. 4dbirds said on August 4, 2020 at 9:39 am

    So sorry about the job. My agency hires writers and editors. Mainly for after reports of audits and investigations that go to congress (and the public), but they also do more creative pieces for newspapers, our intranet and internet. I’ll send a notice when a new position pops up. Listening to everyone’s memories of the Midwest it made me remember when my siblings and I were wrapping up the final things in our mom’s home before we sold it. I looked around the 150 years old farmhouse and the remaining ten acres and told my sister that I didn’t think I would ever return to Missouri again and felt sad. My sister took my hand and said “Let’s make it a sisters’ trip and come here just to visit our grandparents graves, drive by the ancestral home and then drive down to KC for good BBQ”. If it weren’t for Covid, I would be calling her now and arranging the trip. Job Note: Many of our people don’t live here in DC. They are domiciled in their cities/towns.

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  17. LAMary said on August 4, 2020 at 10:22 am

    To celebrate day two of employment some insect bit my left hand while I was outside with the dogs. Didn’t see it happen but now my left hand is on fire and swollen on one side. I am guessing it was a spider, maybe on the doorknob.

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  18. Dorothy said on August 4, 2020 at 10:23 am

    Mary I don’t know if this is the case in every state, but in Ohio a friend shared with me a list of multiple phone numbers to call Unemployment. Julie works in HR and knew about these phone numbers. Each one was for a specific range of social security numbers – well the last 4 digits. I started using that number when I had to call Unemployment and it helped. I seemed to get through more successfully that way. Not that anyone who answered the phone was very helpful. Most of them were temps and I’d get put back on hold or passed along in the pipeline more often than not. I’m not blaming them – the nationwide unemployment folks have been drowning since March.

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  19. Deborah said on August 4, 2020 at 10:29 am

    NEGATIVE!!!!! Both my husband and I got our results via text this morning. First thing I did was give LB a big hug and we both got teary eyed. My husband has been in Abiquiu the last couple of days. I can actually go cautiously out into the city again, mask wearing and social distancing of course.

    4dbirds, where north of KC was your ancestral home? My German ancestors on my mother’s side lived 90 miles north of KC, in a tiny town, Craig, MO. My grandparents house on their former farm is completely gone now, only a few gigantic cottonwood trees are left.

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  20. Julie Robinson said on August 4, 2020 at 10:35 am

    I’m so sorry about the job, Nancy. It may not have been your favorite, but these days almost any job is a good job. And Jefftmmo, I thought you were moving? I must have misread it when you wrote about it.

    Best wishes to you, LAMary, in your new position, and for getting your back unemployment. I’ve been seeing both sides of the mess through my cousin’s eyes. She works for the unemployment office in Iowa and has been putting in 12-14 hour days seven days a week. She’s as helpless to fix the system as anyone else, and listening to people’s sad tales has also taken an emotional toll on her. Iowa, another state run by Republicans.

    I looked up our old house; picture was taken July 2019 and the place looks good, but there is a weird blur over the center third of the photo on the top half. Not sure what that’s about? The current place doesn’t even show up on google maps, which leads to creative conversations about where we live. I’ve contacted the big G several times in an attempt to have it added. There are also no street signs, and when I called the city they said it’s a private street and the owners would have to pay for the signs. Possibly the two are related.

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  21. Icarus said on August 4, 2020 at 10:49 am

    with all the job losses and potential jobs losses, does anyone here recommend a good resume service, or is skilled at doing those themselves? I have liked 6 versions of my resume that I want to combine into one but I keep jacking the formatting.

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  22. jcburns said on August 4, 2020 at 11:24 am

    Icarus, one thing to consider is that in the old days, type and classy paper and so on made an impact, but often resumés are now just scanned into a system and OCRd and really, simple legibility is the priority. Don’t get fancy with multiple columns and so on.

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  23. Snarkworth said on August 4, 2020 at 11:25 am

    What an adorable picture, Nancy! The house is cute, too.

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  24. alex said on August 4, 2020 at 11:46 am

    Icarus, one piece of advice I got recently (not that I’m in the job market or anything) is to always type your resume anew as there are employers who will demand that you provide it in Word format and they will look at your metadata to see how many times you’ve retyped and changed it.

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  25. Dave said on August 4, 2020 at 11:47 am

    We’re also in our Google Streetview picture, only because we saw it coming and thought it would be fun to run out on our front porch to get in the picture. I also took a picture of the Google car as it passed by taking our picture. Our faces are blurred out. Not very exciting but here it is. Yes, I know, our address is here.

    https://goo.gl/maps/DKcmVXokwFBMnkhr6

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  26. Deborah said on August 4, 2020 at 11:57 am

    Me giving job seeking advice is probably ludicrous since I’ve been retired for 8 years and have no idea how it’s done now. When I decided I wanted to leave teaching and get into an art/design related job, I used the book, “What Color is Your Parachute”, I adapted it to work more for my situation. One of the things it said was sending out resumes cold wasn’t the way to get a job etc. Making connections was the best way to get a job and making connections required a lot of research. Anyway it worked for me in 1980, it took me about 8 months to find and get the job I wanted. I recently recommended the book to one of uncle J’s granddaughters who is looking for a new career path. I was surprised that it keeps getting updated.

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  27. 4dbirds said on August 4, 2020 at 12:09 pm

    Deborah, Wonderful news about the negative results. My mother’s house is just outside of Marceline, Missouri and my father was from Brookfield, Missouri. My dad always said WWII was the best thing to happen to him because he became a career soldier and left Missouri. We would visit both sets of grandparents with each move we made across or out of the country and many summers when we were in the States for a long period of time. As an army brat, knowing those grandparents and that farm gave me some roots.

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  28. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on August 4, 2020 at 12:35 pm

    Julie, not moving, just going to be picking up the pace of my dancing the I-70 Shuffle, ‘tween here and Indianapolis & other Hoosier points north and south as we settle estates and arrangements. But staying put in Granville, Ohio as home. And our son is doing his student teaching starting yesterday here in this county, with band pre-camp outdoors on a grid of white spray painted squares next to the high school. We’re all skeptical of how long this is going to last, but both his student teaching school and our local district plan to be back in their buildings by the end of the month, but with remote learning for Level 4 status if we reach it, or for families that choose it, which is running 20-30% around here.

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  29. Deborah said on August 4, 2020 at 1:30 pm

    Someone on twitter asked why every-time you see Donald trump being interviewed he sits like he’s on a toilet. So true. Does he think it makes him look more masculine? Does he think it hides his belly when he leans forward like that?

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  30. basset said on August 4, 2020 at 1:48 pm

    Nice house! How old is it?

    Our Google Earth pic is pretty recent, shows a car we sold back in November but close enough.

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  31. Mark P said on August 4, 2020 at 4:16 pm

    We are so far out of the way that I doubt we’ll ever have a street view photo of our house. Of course, you can’t see our house from the street anyway. But Google Earth shows our new house and the red pickup I bought less than a year ago.

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  32. Colleen said on August 4, 2020 at 4:42 pm

    Google picture of our place is an empty lot…they haven’t been through since the house was built.

    Glad you had some time away. The furthest north in MI I have been is the area where Torch Lake is, for a family friend’s wedding. It’s beautiful.

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  33. Deborah said on August 4, 2020 at 4:52 pm

    Our building in Chicago is all over the internet because it’s a significant historical building by the architect Mies Van der Rohe. Our building in Santa Fe has a Google street view from about 10 years ago. We moved LB in 8 years ago and we’ve made so many improvements it’s not even close anymore. The aerial google map of the property is a bit more current, maybe 5 years ago?

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  34. Sherri said on August 4, 2020 at 5:07 pm

    A different appreciation of that magisterial Ed Yong Atlantic piece linked to in comments on the last post:

    https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2020/what-helped-ed-yong-write-the-sentence-of-the-year/

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  35. Deborah said on August 4, 2020 at 6:00 pm

    Today I listened to 2 fascinating podcast interviews with Stuart Stevens, a former hardcore Republican operative who is now a never Trumper, Lincoln Project adviser. The first podcast was Chris Hayes, Why is this happening and the second was the Project Lincoln podcast. Sorry I don’t have links. There was a lot of overlap between the two but I found them both riveting. His new Book, “It Was All a Lie” came out, he has nothing good to say about the current Republican Party and how it got the way it is since Reagan. I highly recommend one or the other of the two podcasts if not both.

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  36. susan said on August 4, 2020 at 6:26 pm

    Google maps (and GoogleEarth) notes at the bottom of the picture when the imagery was “captured.” I just looked at my house. It’s on a street the googlemobile never goes down, so none of the houses on the street is photographed. But it does “capture” the intersection of my street with the more main street. The latest photo was from July 2019. A semi with trailer takes up the whole frame! And if you go a bit further to the south, a truck pulling a boat on a trailer takes up the rest. Good job, Google!

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  37. Dorothy said on August 4, 2020 at 9:30 pm

    Thanks for that tip, Susan! I just looked more closely at the image and that picture of our house was taken two years before we bought this house. Fascinating.

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  38. alice said on August 4, 2020 at 10:20 pm

    Resumes: had to redo mine recently. Used info from https://www.askamanager.org/, good stuff in the archives, comments helpful as well. Got several offers, so something worked.

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  39. susan said on August 4, 2020 at 10:46 pm

    Also, one really neat feature in GoogleEarth is the history. Down on the lower left of the image there is a year noted, which in the image I’m looking at is 1990. Click that and a time bar shows up with all the years images that were taken since 1990. Click on a year, and you’ll see that year’s image. You can also access history from the tool bar at the top, the clock icon. Click the clock and you’ll get that same time bar at the top of the page. First thing you’ll notice is the black and white photographs before 2005, and the poor resolution. The resolution gets better and better, so that by 2011, it’s really sharp. It’s still getting better, and zooming in on your house from above is pretty darned astonishing. I love looking at my garden from 900 feet altitude. Not a straight line in the whole patch.

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  40. Dexter Friend said on August 5, 2020 at 4:55 am

    After reading these entries about job losses and applications I am glad I am long-retired. Hard factory work wore me out early, and I retired for good at age 53. Didn’t have a nest egg at all, just winged it and ran up a few credit cards, then paid half of them off, and a few years ago I posted my goal was to finally be debt free soon. It looks like within less than 6 months I will finally be debt-free. Of course I barely remember what lobster tastes like and I have not seen a movie in a theater since 1998. I drive hoopdee vehicles. My only concession is my cable TV, but then I did cut out HBO and Showtime, as I get them off my Firestick now. Oh…Carla Lee now has been in a hospital bed in the surgical rehab hospital for six weeks. She had DNA test results come in on Tuesday…not good news. Today (Wed.) a panel of 3 doctors are going to create a pathway to an end of this situation, whatever that means. This is hard on her.

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  41. Deborah said on August 5, 2020 at 9:35 am

    Wow, Dexter, 6 months, I sure hope it gets cleared up soon.

    “Yo semite” what a dumb ass.

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  42. JodiP said on August 5, 2020 at 10:04 am

    Dexter, I really hope the doctors figure out a treatment plan for Carla. This has been so hard.

    Congrats, too on being debt-free in 6 months! It’s a great feeling to apy down debt and actually save proactively.

    I can’t wait to go down the rabbit hole of google maps. But, back to work for now.

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  43. Julie Robinson said on August 5, 2020 at 10:20 am

    Dexter, what an ordeal for Carla Lee. I’m confused as to how a DNA test would impact her medical situation–was it maybe something else? Can you ask a nurse?

    Just watched Trump stumbling over Yosemite, and it made me wonder if he’s ever heard of the park before. We keep learning again and again just how stupid he is, how he’s been surrounded by sycophants who tell him how great he is, and protect him from the reality the rest of us face. It sounds like the new WH chief of staff, Mark Meadows, is the worst of the lot. He’s been the stumbling block in the pandemic relief standoff, and it seems as though he’s not giving Trump the real scoop on the pandemic.

    Deborah asks why Trump sits hunched forward. Besides the stumbling, fumbling and lying, what I noticed about the Axios interview was the chair he was sitting on. It was too short, and looked like he was sitting on a kindergarten chair. Since the interview was at the White House, me thinks a staffer was not so subtly undermining him.

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  44. Scout said on August 5, 2020 at 12:36 pm

    “…what I noticed about the Axios interview was the chair he was sitting on. It was too short, and looked like he was sitting on a kindergarten chair.”
    This is probably by design to make him look like the big man he thinks he is. He’s like a cat who heard a noise, all puffed up to look big and scary. I haven’t seen the whole interview, but what excerpts I did see is more proof that the “president” is a clear and present danger to us all.

    Here is a photo from the first day of school at a high school in Georgia. I give this experiment about two weeks before it all gets shut down again.
    https://twitter.com/Freeyourmindkid/status/1290626349426671617

    The title of this post made me think of the Christopher Buckley novel Boomsday. I recently listened to the audio version with Janeane Garofalo reading. She is awesome. It was a great LOL escape even though it was written 13 years ago.

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  45. Suzanne said on August 5, 2020 at 12:36 pm

    Just a sobering thought that tomorrow is the anniversary of the US dropping the bomb on Hiroshima, which killed roughly 140,000 people.
    I guess the Republicans would say, meh, that’s not much worse than the flu annual death toll.

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  46. Sherri said on August 5, 2020 at 1:13 pm

    Just give all the awards to Ed Yong. He’s doing stellar work writing about the pandemic.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/08/covid-19-immunity-is-the-pandemics-central-mystery/614956/

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  47. LAMary said on August 5, 2020 at 4:03 pm

    Agreed about ED Yong. That article is excellent. Did you see the long paragraph that is one sentence? Semicolons are used perfectly.

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  48. beb said on August 5, 2020 at 6:30 pm

    It is possible that Trump has never heard of Yosemite National Park because it is west of the Hudson River but more likely is that he has never seen it written before. Now I’m wondering if I’ve been mispronouncing all this time. Yo-sem-in-nee? Just don;t get me started on “warsh.”

    So how does one turn on the underline feature?

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  49. Julie Robinson said on August 5, 2020 at 6:55 pm

    Scout, I would’ve thought Trump to be the guy whose chair is taller than everyone else’s, to make him feel bigger and more important than he is. A big boy chair, if you will.

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  50. LAMary said on August 5, 2020 at 9:31 pm

    The big boy chair doesn’t have a belt to hold you in and there’s no tray attached for your food. Also no handful of cheerios to keep you entertained while the grown ups finish their food.

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  51. jcburns said on August 5, 2020 at 11:15 pm

    What’s an underline feature?

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  52. Sherri said on August 6, 2020 at 1:35 am

    Love this protester in Portland

    https://twitter.com/BizballMaury/status/1291234379658752001

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  53. beb said on August 6, 2020 at 2:05 am

    JCBurns are you being snarky or is this some kind of Apple thing. It’s a command, like Italics and Bold, except it puts an underline under the letters. It should be angle-bracket U angle-bracket.

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  54. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on August 6, 2020 at 8:42 am

    JC, you made me LLOL.

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  55. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on August 6, 2020 at 8:47 am

    Okay, I’m screwing this up somehow.

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  56. alex said on August 6, 2020 at 10:54 am

    playing with HTML

    can’t get it to underscore

    How do you do a strikethrough?

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  57. alex said on August 6, 2020 at 12:29 pm

    And here’s some cause for celebration: The NRA is finally going to get what it’s long had coming.

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  58. tajalli said on August 6, 2020 at 12:44 pm

    Alex@56: the strikethrough command in HTML uses an “s” in between side carets (caps for comma and period on keyboard) to start and requires the ending command enclosed in side carats with an backslash prior to that “s”, the same syntax as other commands.

    Underlined (underscored) uses a “u” with the same surrounding symbols and also requires the closing backslash command.

    “SAMS Teach Yourself HTML 4 in 24 Hours” has comprehensive command lists in the back. No doubt this info is online, but I just pull my 2000 version of the book off the shelf. I am a caterfly.

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  59. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on August 6, 2020 at 12:48 pm

    Aaaaand Mike DeWine tests positive on his way to greet Trump in Cleveland (they did a rapid test, and they do have about 17% false positives). The anti-maskers on my social media are having a field day, of course. Never hits the right people, he said sinfully.

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  60. alex said on August 6, 2020 at 12:57 pm

    Thanks tajalli. I tried carat u carat carat slash u carat at #56 but no luck. carat i carat carat slash i carat worked though. And at #57 I had to paste in the link again on edit because it disappeared.

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  61. tajalli said on August 6, 2020 at 1:07 pm

    Okay, Alex. That “u” has been deprecated in HTML5 (used almost exclusively in website design these days).

    General tag list:
    https://www.w3schools.com/TAGS/default.ASP

    Style format for underscoring required for HTML5:
    https://www.tutorialspoint.com/how-to-underline-a-text-in-html

    Sites courtesy of Uncle Google.

    Khan Academy has good courses in HTML CSS and loads of other computer science topics and it’s free. Some libraries offer Lynda courses for free. Bon apetite!

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  62. jcburns said on August 6, 2020 at 3:22 pm

    Tajalli is quite correct. The ‘u’ tag has been deprecated (that means the standards-setters of the internet warn, “hey, this is going away”) for some time now. The way your comments look is controlled pretty tightly by the CSS—the stylesheet I cobbled together for Nancy’s site. Some sites underline links as a matter of course—this one doesn’t. But there are always brute force ways.

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  63. beb said on August 6, 2020 at 3:31 pm

    alex, to get a strikethrough, he command that works here us [strike] where angle brackets replace the square brackets. I would have thought that [s] would have worked like [i] and [b], and [u] ought to have but it seems like HTML is getting too big for it’s britches.

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  64. James said on August 8, 2020 at 9:32 am

    You had your time to cash in, honey. Once Trump is gone, you’ll just be another very low-rent Peggy Noonan, at one-tenth the salary, if that.

    So, by late January 2025?

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