Category: Life

Well, first off, after church, I made a trip to Lowe’s. The 18 volt DeWalt cordless drill I have came with two battery packs, but only one of them continues to work, so I hoped to pick up a couple of spares and another drill that fits them. However, a new standard, 20 Volt, has taken over, so the shop did not offer an 18 volt drill. Instead of buying a couple spare 18 volt packs and a new 20 volt cordless drill, I opted for the spare packs and a cheap corded drill.

Because on Saturday, I’d started working on a project, and I spent a lot of time changing between a drill bit and a screwdriver bit, and I wanted to be able to just switch drills instead of bits.

Which worked out all right.

I’ve built a rudimentary set of shelving for my records:

They’re rough and probably high school shop D-level work, but with a paint job and a bunch of records on them, they’ll do. Given that they’re constructed from (inexpensive) two by fours, this shouldn’t happen again. The fact that they all said STUD while I was working on them was very affirming. And they’re modular, so I can move them around and stack them up and add another tier when it becomes necessary (probably after the next Friends of the Springfield-Greene County book sale in the autumn).

They impressed my beautiful wife, anyway, but she’s not the son of a carpenter.

In addition, when we stopped at the grocery store after Lowe’s, I got it in my head to make a chocolate pudding pie. However, my wife does not like chocolate pudding pie. So I got the fixings for a cherry pie as well.

So I’m not sure if I’m operating my masculinity at a deficit here; there are two pies, but does the record shelving count as two or as one? Also, the record shelves are not yet done. I’m going to have to let the Internet judge here.

Also, I did not actually have any pie; my wife prepared pasta for dinner, and I had so much of her delicious Italian cooking that I did not have room for pie. I might make up for it by eating one or the other pie remainders today.

Yesterday was the latest in my series of lucky days.

So I packed my bags for a martial arts class, and I hoped to attend one or more while my children did Vacation Bible School (I would have just said VBS, but I’m not sure how well an increasingly secular society would understand just the abbreviation). As we were driving to church, I heard a ticking from my car echoed as we passed other cars. As I changed a directional signal earlier in the day, a strange procedure that had me lying under the truck and groping with one hand into the bowels of the vehicle, I wondered if I’d moved something that was now rhythmically striking something.

I got the kids to VBS and made it to the martial arts school with five minutes to change before the early class. I pulled into a spot with a car on the left and an empty space on the right. I got my bags and went around to the passenger side of the car so I could navigate more easily with the duffel bags.

Wherein I spotted a nail and a bracket in the right front tire with an attendant hissing sound of escaping air.

I ran down the scenario in my head: I could change the tire now, or I could change the tire after class, and get the boys. Of course, this is the newer truck, so I’m not even sure where the jack and doughnut are.

It’s a most inconvenient time to be down a vehicle; my beautiful wife is traveling for work this week, so the family’s second car is sitting in the airport parking lot.

So I got into the bathroom to change into my gi, and it occurred to me that it was 5:45, and the tire shop around the corner was still open. And the tire probably had enough air in it to make it to the tire shop.

So I left the martial arts school and made it to the tire shop ten minutes before their closing. I made arrangements for the boys’ grandmother to pick up the boys if I had to leave the car overnight, but the tire shop accommodated me and replaced the tire after their official closing time.

So it really was my lucky day: if I hadn’t gone around to the passenger side of the car, I wouldn’t have seen the problem, and I might well have tried to drive off with a flat tire and might not have had time to pick the kids up. If I hadn’t discovered it and gotten to the tire shop before it closed, I might be down a vehicle and have had to figure out how to get it to a shop and to chauffeur the kids around until my wife returns.

Whenever I have a car issue that could leave me stranded, and I handle it correctly, I feel delightfully competent as an adult. The feeling doesn’t last–I’m soon back to the general “What am I doing?”

The headline and article in the Greene County Commonwealth might contain a typo:

Because, as we know, the sign says something different:

It might have taken 13 years to get the plat approved, but the existing subdivision is only now filling out with homes.

So the martial arts school where I study has replaced a water wall, which really was more of a water on the floor by the wall in the brief period where it was operational, with a fish tank to which they’re slowly adding fish, and I mentioned that I knew a guy who had a saltwater tank and was raising anemone. Sea anemone, that is, not the terrestrial flower after which it is named.

One of the listeners made mock of my pronunciation of the word, which immediately made me self-conscious of my pronunciation.

via GIPHY

As you know, gentle reader, I have learned a vast quantity of my vocabulary from books, so I’m especially self-conscious of pronouncing things incorrectly. Recently, I’m pretty sure I’ve stumbled over perfidy and have ruled out of using opprobium in conversation.

Which is just as well; the Internet tells me I missed an R in it.

Perhaps I should start making use of that little “Say it” button so I know how to pronounce things. Unfortunately, when I’m about to drop an exotic word in conversation, that button isn’t handy, and looking it up on my phone fails to make me look smart in the moment.

Oh, and back to anemone. The question was whether I was throwing an extra N in it. In my defense, I might have said “an anemone.”

But the problem wouldn’t have occurred in the first place if I’d said sea anemone, which is what I was talking about. But I know aquaria less than I know exotic words and how to use them.

Millennial dads have pathetic DIY skills compared to baby boomers:

Are dads’ essential DIY skills in decline? According to new research, millennial dads are less capable than their own dads when it comes to everyday DIY fixes, preferring to rely on professional help instead.

A new poll of 1,000 millennial dads and 1,000 baby boomer dads found that when a DIY task needs to be done at home, more than half of millennials prefer to call a professional.

Tools owned:

• Cordless drill (although I don’t have enough batteries).
• Stepladder (One and a convertible step ladder).
• Set of screwdrivers (a bunch of screwdrivers, not a matched set).
• Hammer (More than one).

Tasks:

• Change a car tire on the side of the road (last performed last winter, in the dark, on ice).
• Unblock a toilet or sink (well, I can do it sometimes; I had trouble with my mother-in-law’s toilet this spring).
• Reset a tripped circuit breaker (well, it took me a long time to reset the GFCI in my garage because the outlet was behind a pile of things on the built-in shelves, and it took me years to find it.
• Open a stuck pickle jar with their hands (Come on, I lift weights for a reason).
• Repair a flat tire on your child’s bike (to be fair, my beautiful wife certainly could as she is a serious cyclist).
• Restart a stopped furnace (I probably ought to learn it).

I tend to run self-analysis on this front as my father was very toxicly masculine and was steeped in the knowledge of the outdoors (a former Boy Scout and lifelong hunter), car repair (when we lived in the projects, he had a second 1967 Chevy Impala that he kept for parts), and household repair (in Noggle and Son Remodeling, he was the third generation).

I’m not as bad as a millenial dad who answers polls on the Internet, but I’m not near my father or even my brother (or, perhaps, my sainted mother) in basic competence. But I’m getting better about it.

(He said as he was taking bids to replace his gutters).

The actual Alarm blog post presents this in a light more flattering to millenial dads, who are replacing DIY skills with knowing to buy quality tech products like whatever Alarm.com offers. Hey, I can’t knock the blog post too badly. I’m contracted to write blog posts like it from time to time.

I mentioned we’re looking to plan a beach vacation next year. We were thinking of Florida, but we might end up in Hawaii if my beautiful wife learns you can have a beach vacation and hundreds of cats:

Some come to Hawaii to swim and frolic in the legendary turquoise surf. Others sprawl in the sun with skin slathered in lotion until they are as crispy, oily, and golden as a potato pancake.

Me? I came to Hawaii for the cats.

There is a magical place — call it heaven, Shangri-la, Xanadu, or Abraham’s bosom — where more than 600 cats roam on a 3-acre sanctuary. For crazy cat ladies and gentlemen such as myself, the Lanai Cat Sanctuary certainly sounds like heaven on earth.

Well, my fellow cat fanciers, I made the pilgrimage, and I’m happy to report that the Lanai Cat Sanctuary does not disappoint.

It beats alligators.

How is mowing the lawn at Nogglestead like playing Mario Kart?

You have to dodge a lot of turtle shells.

I saw this fellow in the grass from a couple of mower widths over and couldn’t figure out what it was until I got right up on him and nudged him with the front wheel. After that, I let him be, and he thought he had his own bug blind in the middle of the yard and was content to hang out there for as long as I could tell.

Kim du Toit today posts a response to the NRA Dream Gun sweepstakes.

It’s a decent-enough selection of guns, I suppose — but the problem is that I would only want to own a few of them (4/18), namely:

• Browning A5 Sweet Sixteen (16ga)
• Remington 870 (20ga)
• Kimber 1911 Raptor II (.45ACP)
• Colt King Cobra (.357 Mag)

,,,and I’m kinda iffy about the short barrels on the last two anyway. The rest of the guns are either in the wrong chambering (.224 Valkyrie?), duplicates of stuff I already own (.30x bolties), or a type of firearm I don’t care to own anyway (AR-15 variants) — even for free. (If I were promiscuous when it came to guns, then I could take any of the eighteen, but I’m not That Guy.)

I enter these every time they come along, and frankly, I am That Guy, I suppose. I don’t have a gun budget, and the NRA competition would quickly fill my (new-if-I-win) big gun safe.

When I enter, I make my selection based on common chamberings between guns at the prize level, chamberings I’d be able to get cheap ammo for, and then name (Weatherby over Ruger) just for bragging rights.

But I never send a contribution; there’s a checkbox at the bottom for declining but entering since no purchase is necessary.

As a matter of fact, I’ve got an outgoing entry on my desk that I haven’t mailed as I’ve been out of town. Probably the same sweepstakes that Kim got. I’ll probably mail it tomorrow and forget about it as odds are very low in winning.

Inside a record I bought earlier this month, I found a mimeographed copy of the Licking High School Pep Club Constitution.

In purple, as Ditto intended.

Click for full size

Licking is a small town a little northeast of here. I’ve never been, but I’ve tried on occasion to subscribe to the local paper, The Licking News, from time to time ever since one got misdelivered to me a couple years back. However, I’ve not pursued it to the point of actually subscribing. Just looking on the Web site for an online form to subscribe and pay. Which isn’t there yet.

Technically, this is not a Found Bookmark nor is it as interesting, I suppose, as a record store receipt, but it’s something.

Now that I’ve scanned it, what do I do with it? Pitch it, or try to repatriate it to Licking High School or the Texas County museum (which happens to be in Licking). I mean, it’s a piece of ephemera, but don’t they want it all?

As my beautiful wife and I were driving back from dinner on Friday night, I noticed numerous old cars headed north on Glenstone.

“I wonder if there’s a car show,” I said. “It’s not the Route 66 Festival.”

There was: The Street Rod Nationals.

I have not been to a car show in a while. Well, except the Royal Run and Rides 5K and car show that I have run the last couple of years, but I count that as a 5K.

I’ve always wanted to be able to build things with wood. It runs in the family. Noggle and Son Remodelers was a going thing for a couple generations of Noggles and their sons, but it folded when I was a mere lad. My parents split before I reached an age where my father could teach me those practical woodworking skills, and all I got from my childhood years was building treehouses with scrap lumber and recycled nails.

But I’ve wanted those skills, but I haven’t spent a lot of time trying to learn them. I mean, I built an outdoor toybox for my boys. But fine furniture was out of my reach.

So I thought I would build a cart for storage in my garage. We have some built-in shelving with space underneath, and we’ve stored sporting equipment and Nerf guns in plastic bins, but I wanted something that would roll in and roll out and fill the space instead of sticking out and leaving some vertical height.

So I measured and bought some lumber. And put it off. Mostly because the lumber was more expensive than the scrap lumber I built treehouses with. Then I built the base of the cart, a floor with some wheels, and it sat in my garage for months like an oversized skateboard that took up space as part of the mess instead of helping alleviate the mess in the garage.

So last weekend, I apparently had forgotten the price of the lumber enough that I was no longer afraid to bollix it up. I got about to framing the cart, and I put the walls on it this weekend.

I worked mostly from plans in my head and with a jigsaw and circular saw for cutting instead of a table saw (I have one, but I don’t actually have a table for it). I over-engineered it a bit and put in more screws than absolutely necessary. And I miscalculated the width of it so that the walls of the sides are inside the framing instead of the outside, and the framing is an inch and a half more shallow than the base.

But the first is done.

And it fits where it’s supposed to fit.

It took four or five hours to finish it up, so probably six hours total. I am going to build another; I bought enough lumber for two. One for sporting equipment and one for Nerf guns. I’m not sure if I will paint them or not as I am going to want to hurry into getting my garage cleaned up.

But the next goal beyond these carts is building some record storage since the collection has far outstripped the overloaded bookshelves that I painted seven years ago.

You know why I haven’t done hat much practicing and acquiring this skill? Because I often don’t feel like I have the hours to dedicate to learning it with all the time I expend getting and spending and laying waste my powers and pretty much maintaining in the day to day. But it looks like I find plenty of time to blog about every little thing I do accomplish. So it’s a time management and prioritization problem.

We will see how long it takes for me to make that second cart.

Spotted on the Powerline blog Week in Pictures:

I think it was on March 16 as I was coming back from ABC Books. The carrier turned left onto Republic Road and passed me going the other way.

Of course, it might still be in town since VisionCon is this weekend.

I was toying with the idea of going, and that’s now greatly increased as I see that Jewel Staite will be there. Shiny.

My youngest son is having a birthday soon, and I wrapped his gifts today. A while ago, I bought a couple rolls of birthday wrapping paper, but apparently, I’ve run through them, and I had some green crafting paper and some old wallpaper that I use as wrapping paper because it’s thick and stiff, so it doesn’t wrinkle or tear. Also, it was like a buck at a garage sale a long time ago.

Apparently, I’ve been in this situation on May 9 before.

This year, though the green craft paper covered both gifts with no waste, so no wallpaper for the laddie this year.

But I’ll probably wrap gifts for his children in this wallpaper.

Is this your second post from Facebook memories you’ve done this week, Brian J.? you ask. Yes, I guess so. Some weeks I got nothing.

Tam K., as do we all, responds in a Pavlovian fashion to the Daily Double sounder on Jeopardy!:

Personally, as someone who has traditionally yelled “BET IT ALL!” at the screen every time Double Jeopardy came up, I’m enthralled to run across a contestant with the chutzpah to do just that.

In my head, I can still hear my oldest son at two exclaiming that when he heard the Jeopardy! sounder in our house in Old Trees some decade ago.

I went looking through my new computer to see if I recorded it, or if I’ll just have to remember it as best I can. It looks like I’ll just have to savor the memory.

However, I did mention it on Facebook.

Nine years ago today. Exactly.

/p>

Our shoes spent the night next to the door to our storm room.

Our storm room is an interior room with one side in the earth, two sides of brick, and with the ceiling joists supported with extra braces. It has a gravel floor, though, since our pump tanks and whatnot are in there. We store a card table and matching chairs in there along with flashlights, a little food, and a radio just in case.

Last night, we had tornado warnings off and on from 3pm to a little after 9pm. Our weather radio squalled a couple of times, and the local sirens went off once, but most of the real action took place northwest and southeast of Nogglestead.

Still, we have to be readier than we did in Saint Louis or Milwaukee. Every couple of years, a tornado touches down hereabouts. About fifteen or twenty years ago, a nearby barn got destroyed and a woman was killed because instead of seeking shelter, she went to calm her horses. It’s an apocryphoral story, though, since it’s from before we were here, and I don’t remember exactly who told it.

I know you loyal readers in Oklahoma understand.

UPDATE: A loyal reader in Oklahoma documents his response to the same system, experienced during his commute as crazy thunderstorms.

It would be my home in eight weeks if I had the money: A castle outside Clever, Missouri:

5000 square feet on 10 acres, and the shields on the gate already have the letter N on them.

At roughly a million dollars, it might still be on the market by the time I can afford it. Unfortunately, I’ll need hyperinflation to get there, but unfortunately, in that event, I wouldn’t get change from my $200,000,000 bill.