It doesn't does, but it could! Wisconsin and Michigan trip, day 6

Derek and I woke up this morning at 9, knowing we had quite the undertaking to get all of our rock buckets back out by 11am. We had done most of the cleaning up of everything the night before, so really it was just repacking our cooler, repacking our food bags, and making the forty billion trips back and forth with our buckets and boxes. We are normally immaculate little guests, we leave everything exactly as we find it, or exactly as hotel staff asks. This is the only time I can recall in twelve years of traveling together that Derek and I have left anything worse than we found it, and it was just one towel, but we fucking DESTROYED it. 

I am sorry to this towel.

That was after I spent thirty minutes trying to clean it and wring out all of the dirt, so believe it or not, that is the towel's best self after we sullied it. A day after we left, I noticed a 7 dollar charge from the hotel on our card. Derek thinks we got dinged for the towel, I think it was likely a parking fee. I hid that towel in the lump of the other towels we used, and I assume it just got scooped up and thrown into the general housekeeping towel bin. 

You can barely tell we were looking through decades old dirty rocks that smell like old lady basement!

Initially we had flirted with the idea of heading back to the lake to look for more rocks, but we instead hit up Pan Asia for ingredients to make evil jungle prince for my birthday dinner. Derek had ben pissing me the fuck off, but I think that's more the fault of perimenopause than him (I commented two days later that I've noticed my rage is more formidable and easier to tap into, and he said that he thinks my rage has lessened, so that's a terrible sign about who I've been in the last 12 years), though in fairness, who's to say? He IS maddening with reliable regularity. I stomped of into Pan Asia by myself while Derek went to Harbor Freight, and I made friends with a lovely mother and daughter who had never been in Pan Asia and were very lost, both in terms of knowing where ingredients were, and WHAT ingredients were. They very kindly offered to take me out to lunch after I walked them through all of their shopping list (AND I gave them the very last bag of Thai Basil, which I myself needed), and if Derek and I had had another day in Milwaukee, I honestly would have accepted and gone to lunch with them. But I remorsefully declined, and after sharing the story with Derek, regretted not giving them my card so they could tell me how their meal turned out. 

After that, we drove straight back to Madison. The rest of the day was pretty easy, as days go. We had to go back to Woodman's to get dinner stuff, which ended up being cabbage dish. We also needed to head to Home Depot for a few things Derek needed to work on the saw, and on the way to Home Depot, I said we should head to Fromagination. We did that, and found it closed. 

"We stand in solidarity with Corey Ruiz. We will be closed today, we are standing in solidarity with our community and supporting the space needed for the gathering, reflection, and calls for justice. Thank you for understanding."

This article really and truly highlights how passive voice, privilege, and being completely out of fucking touch with what minoritized communities have been shouting about for decades can ruin otherwise correct opinions on how fucked the privileged allow things to stay, but I'm using this one instead of others I read because it does the least amount of tap dancing for police and their ongoing brutalization of anyone and everyone with total fucking impunity. There is no such fucking thing as a good cop. Cops are class traitors that are not there to protect you, they are there to serve the predator class. Fuck the police forever and always. They are not our friends, they are not members of our community, they are villainous predators that function only as the brutality arm of the government that acts on the threats of law and order. This is, yet again, state fucking sanctioned murder, and it's going to continue to be a problem until enough of us wake the fuck up and put aside our comforts and feel goods and do more than walk around the state capitol once or twice a week with permits and signs and megaphones.

It feels gross to move on with highlighting our day like things are normal, but that is so much of every day now. And I'm guilty of doing it, and to pretend I'm not would be grosser than any kind of half baked virtue signal I could dream up to seem "like a good one". 

When we got back to Derek's mom's, Derek got back to work on the saw, and I got to work on dinner stuff. I made cabbage dish with pan fried tofu. Derek told his mom it's one of his favorite things that I make, so she really wanted to try it. She loved it, I am happy to report. 

Derek worked on the saw pretty late into the evening while Beth and I chatted. I had to drag him away at 12:30 so he could come to bed. It isn't like we had anything of importance to do in the morning, but I knew he'd stay out there until 4am, hyperfocused on his task.