Don't feel bad if you don't know about pasties, I never heard of them till I moved up here.
The Upper Peninsula of Michigan. In some areas, pasties are a significant tourist attraction,[54] including an annual Pasty Fest in Calumet, Michigan in mid August. Pasties in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan have a particularly unusual history. Many ethnic groups adopted the pasty for use in the Copper Country copper mines; the Finnish immigrants to the region mistook it for the traditional piiraat and kuuko pastries.[55][56] The pasty has become strongly associated with all cultures in this area, and in the similar Iron Range in northern Minnesota.
For some years now our local chapter of the Vietnam Veterans of America has conducted a pasty sale on the third Friday of every month except December. They make these things from scratch, assembling the ingredients the day before, baking them in the early morning hours, and selling them from 10:00 AM until sold out, usually by 1:00 PM. Their pasties are so popular that the market would easily support a full time restaurant business, but the Vietnam Vets are getting on in years and are not interested in going into the restaurant business. They just do this once a month to raise money for the support of their chapter and its various charity operations. They stopped holding these sales a year ago when the COVID hit the fan, and have just now resumed the operation. I don't know if Queen Gretchen shut them down or if the vets themselves decided they were too risky, but the important thing is they are back now, which I take as a sign that we are finally on the road to recovery.
The powers that be are still jerking us around with their vaccination program. You have to "pre-register", which means you are on a waiting list to get on the real list. They say that they don't know how much vaccine they will receive in any give week, but it's been consistently less than they requested. The thing is, much of the vaccine is manufactured right here in Michigan, but it has to be routed to the federal government, which allocates it to the state governments, which allocates it to the local health departments.
I was never really afraid of catching the virus because it was pretty scarce around here until recently. Last I heard Cheboygan County was up to almost a thousand cases and 34 deaths, after hanging all summer at 21 cases and three deaths. In the beginning we were advised to avoid crowds and stay home as much as possible, and I've been living like that for a long time anyway. I never did lollygag in town, preferring to conduct my business and go home as soon as possible. The things that bothered me the most about the pandemic were the empty shelves in the stores and those stupid masks. I don't even mind the social distancing, six feet is plenty close enough as far as I'm concerned.
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