Speaking of which, I need to get an axe, and I don't know if getting a used axe from the internet is a good idea or a bad idea. And before you connect one and two together in a bad way, my neighbor finally downed the dead birch tree in her yard, finally. And there's a lot of really good logs. And it turns out birch is actually pretty heavy. I don't own a chainsaw, um, because I just -- I've never needed a chainsaw. I ha- -- Do I have loppers? I don't think I even have loppers. I think I just don't have anything. I have hedge shears, but that's not quite what I need. And I need to get an axe to split the wood. But I don't own an axe. And I mean there's the question of what happens when I buy a used axe, and what did the previous owner do with the axe? And that's a scary question when you're buying off of, like, Craigslist or something 'cause Craiglist is kind of shady sometimes. Anyway, everyone's afraid to let me borrow an axe now, apparently, for murder reasons. Why would I murder someone with an axe? Um, yeah, so I don't know what to do because it's nice to have a bonfire, but it's also nice to be able to not chuck a literal entire log onto the bonfire and hope it catches. Hence, I need to buy an axe or borrow an axe. Apparently, no one's going to let me borrow an axe because they either like, you know, like I just said, or they just don't have an axe on them. I guess normal people don't just own axes for whatever reason. I've got a firefighter, maybe I can ask that guy!

I don't remember ever having stage fright per se, but there was a time when I completely did not know the lines that I was supposed to be reciting. I don't think that it was necessarily that I was afraid to say them and I like tensed and I forgot them. I think that I just never really learned them. It was my senior year in college and it wasn't a very big presentation or performance. I don't even know what you would call it. But we as seniors in the German program had to present a, a reading basically. We had to memorize some sort of text in German and basically perform it in front of a fairly small group of people but still a, a group of people. And, I remember I was just so done with school at that point. It was right at the end of my senior year and I was done. And I remember not really putting in very much effort to actually learn this piece that I was supposed to learn and it was kind of a fun -- it wasn't a dry like text or it was -- I'm not even gonna say it correctly, Struwwelpeter?  I can't even remember what it was. But it was this -- I mean, it was kind of a children's story but like a very, very creepy adult children's story. And I just didn't know it, like, I just did not know it. And I went up there and I -- like I said, I don't think I was -- I don't think I had stage fright or I don't think I was really afraid to say it and I kind of just stood up there, like I really don't know this. And somebody else who was clearly a much better student that I was at that point. I think she had either learned the same thing or she -- maybe we'd practiced it. I don't -- somehow she kind of knew what I was supposed to say, so she was like trying to help me along with it to kinda prompt me so that it would maybe cue me into actually saying the proper thing. But it, it never -- it didn't. Like I really just did not do well with it at all. I don't remember if we were graded on it or what…

And instead of a misclassification, I, this morning, was classified entirely correctly, apparently. I got a car semi recently, in the last eight months, and I haven't seen or been around family with it yet. And I don't talk with my family that much and so, you know, the car was a big deal to me and stuff. But like they haven't heard that much about it or anything. And I showed up at my grandpa's house today, and I pulled in the driveway, and there are many cars there. And then I go inside, and stuff is happening, and I'm not really thinking that much of it. No one's asking about it. We're moving on with our day. And then at some point, someone mentions how my grandpa has to go somewhere, but it's hard for him to get into cars. And it's easier if they're low to the ground, it's hard for him to step up. And then someone's like, "Oh, [Diarist's name] got that car that's really low to the ground out there." And I turned around and I’m like, "How do you know I have that car that's really low to the ground out there?" And they -- everyone -- just looked at me and was like, "Obviously that is your car." And that is because most of my uncles have pickup trucks, my parents have an SUV, everyone has American-made cars. Most of my family works for American car companies, right? It is Michigan. And I was sitting there with my little Honda hybrid. It's a Honda Insight, which is Honda's version of a Prius, but it's a little bit smaller than a Prius. So this is my little hybrid hatchback, and it did not occur to me that everyone would know it's my car.  I don't even feel like I talk about politics or things that often with my family. I kind of keep my mouth shut, but everyone knew. And I'm glad everyone knew, I'm glad that like, you know, even if I mostly keep my mouth shut, and I don't interact with these people that much, and I don't see them that much, at least they know enough about me that somehow every single person there knew it was my car. And it was, in fact! I love my car very much. Well, actually I kind of hate cars in general, and…

So a story as old as time, my mother-in-law says some pretty unhinged things, and they're always pretty harmless, but she fully lives in a reality separate from the one that everyone else lives in. So she'll say something with such conviction, and you'll know that it sounds really wrong, but the way she says it and the confidence she has, you start to question everything. So there was a time we were visiting, we were at their house, and they had just semi-adopted a cat that was hanging around their house, and it was a long haired -- it was really slight, like very small, but it looked like a Maine Coon, like really, really long fur, um, kinda that same coloring. And we're talking, and she's talking about this cat, and then she said, "Oh, yes, this cat is part raccoon, like half raccoon." And I was kind of laughing, like, “Yeah, it kind of looks like a raccoon”. Um, you know, maybe because it’s feral, she was saying that. And then it occurred to me, based on what she kept saying, that she like truly believed it was a cat-raccoon hybrid. So I said, "Oh, that's not a thing, like they don't mate." And she's like, "Oh, no, they definitely do." And I was like. "Well, if they do mate," which you know, maybe you hear about seals having sex with penguins or whatever, "like the action might take place, but they can't produce offspring." And I was trying to describe that to her, and she was just "Oh," like, "oh, okay. No, well it is." Um, so just like super dismissive. And like, you know, it's low enough stakes. It's like, I don't care, if you want to believe that that cat is half raccoon, go for it, it definitely isn't. But like, you'll bring it up later. Like something else that she said, you know, along those same lines, and it's just a very kind of condescending like, "Oh, okay." Like, you know, you say the thing that is actually the truth, and she just kind of smiles like you're out of it or out of your mind. So, um, yeah. That's, uh, that's a specific instance I can think of, but like I said, she really pulls a lot of those out of her hat.

The other -- another story is I took my grandma out to a car show in Cedar, Michigan 'cause my dad was -- had a car in the show. And they had one of those like tethered balloons where you could -- they'd take you on a ride. I'm doing air quotes right now which you can't see, but. So, you get in the basket, and it goes a certain number of feet in the air, floats around for a minute and then they, you know, take you back down. And I remember that I s- -- I asked my grandma if she wanted to do that. She's -- this was, this was probably just a couple of years ago maybe, and she's, you know, got her walker and you know, she's not, not super mobile, but she was like, "Oh, yeah, let's go do that!" She was like so excited to do it, and we were so bummed because they had just ended the, the rides and so like the -- when we, when we got there and saw it up in the air, that was like the last ride that they were doing for the day. So we were, we were pretty bummed because I think it would've been really funny to see her up in, up in a balloon, but maybe another time.