Misfit Moms

Tuba

Stitch and Bitch

The snood makes a comeback

Three Brave Souls

A Beautiful Thing

sunday sunday

ah, another day of icy shanty fun.

apparently, mercury is in retrograde. things are supposed to go wrong, and boy, are they.

marlaine is still really sick.
my car crapped out on me on the drive back to shantyville yesterday- smoke was pouring from the engine, all the dummy lights were blinking, power steering was gone. i sat near the ice and made a phone call. mary (lizardacres.com) from arizona said she'd keep an eye on our shanty and lock it up at the end of the day. (thanks mary!) i turned around and headed back to mpls. i made it to my mechanics parking lot, and the car died 10 feet from a parking spot. so, i had to push it the last 10 feet and bundle up and walk the two miles home. i was laughing hysterically.

today, thankfully, kindra (kindraishere.blogspot.com), armed with layers of clothing, the shanty's combo and instructions on how to turn on the heater, went to our shanty and set up shop. (thanks kindra!) the big sniffing buffalo hubby of mine drove the soup out to the ice, and will return to close up shop. i wonder if there will be any people out there to eat the soup?

whew.

COLD bunny hopping

whew! it's COLD out on the ice today. it's not so much the temp, but the wind whipping snow into tiny needles that sting your skin, if it's exposed.

marlaine is home sick today, and i'm holding down the fort, literally. our roof was sort of hopping with the wind...kind of beginning to blow off the top of our shanty. a few friendly visitors helped me tie it down! i hope it works, we sure need our roof. at 10am sharp, a little boy named joe and his dad and dog showed up in our shanty. he and i played a mean game of badmitten/hockey on the snowy lake.

today was the attempt at breaking a world record- the longest bunny hop on a frozen lake. the long line of people bundled up hopped their little frozen heart out! it was really beautiful and very very fun. i hope we broke the record!

i'm home on a nursing break (little frances won't take a bottle. drat!)
i'd better head back to the tundra for more fun and games.

Fur Hats and Balmy Days

It was so balmy on the lake this past Sunday I didn't even turn the heater on in the shanty. Whoa. However, Karen's soup was still a welcome bowl of warm in the busy afternoon. Bring your own bowl and spoon and you too can have some soup out on the ice every Sunday around 1p.
On Saturday, my big sister came all the way from South Carolina to amaze us, once again, with her clarinet solo stylings. That's her in the black fur wig-like hat and that's me in a rabbit fur baseball cap.
Peter Haakon-Thompson of Autoethnographic Shanty fame ran a knot-tying workshop in the Misfit Toys on Saturday. Once again, it was a rousing success. I cleared out once the shanty was rocking with a bunch of giant men eager to learn how to tie the bowline. These guys seemingly appeared from nowhere, with beer cans in hand and some time to kill. I think one guy called himself 'high life'. Ha! That's one more reason why I love being on a frozen lake surrounded by stuffed animals watching worlds collide.

Tea and Sympathy

Good gravy, opening weekend was brutal out on Medicine Lake. Saturday morning I showed up, eventually got the heater going and tried to boil water for tea (no luck). So I commenced sitting and eating snacks while brave souls came and went throughout the day. Our shanty was only half stuffed(see previous post) so I decided for opening weekend it was the Misfit Vista Shanty: a stuffed animal/clear plastic hybrid of our favorite sunny shanty from last year, The Vista Shanty. We used the same plasic that the Vista folks used last year so it was great to have them darken our door on opening day to compare notes on the wonders of brittle plastic sheeting in high winds.

Existential Crisis

All systems down. Thursday night our truck shit the bed. Friday morning Karen got the vomit virus. High winds and arctic conditions meant sheathing the shanty exterior with brittle plastic became a Herculean task. However, stupidity and a sheer force of will won out. Long-suffering husband Kurt and I left the ice at sundown, leaving behind us a partially stuffed and fully sheathed shanty standing mighty against the wind.