Category: Life

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.

Last evening, my twelve-year-old son asked me a question that took me aback and led to a stammering, rambling, and incomplete response that probably left the boy more befuddled than when he asked.

He asked me for an overview of the Terminator story.

I mean, I have only seen the first three movies (of five, apparently), the television series, and read one of the books. So I’m not an expert.

I could made it through explaining Skynet, sort of, and the plot of the first two movies and a bit about the television series, but, honestly, it’s hard to explain them all in gestalt. It’s probably best to explain each movie or property discretely and then gloss over the problems in the timelines and continua.

I don’t think he got it. I’m not sure I do. Perhaps the best explanation is the simplest. Intelligent unstoppable killing machines travel time to kill people who are troublesome in the future.

Man, I wish he would have asked me to explain something I understand better. Like women.

You know, broccoli producers of the world sell broccoli whole, or they cut the top off and sell it marked up as broccoli crowns, or they cut it even shorter and bag it as broccoli florets (sold at a premium), which leaves them with lots of broccoli stalks that, what, get sold for silege?

Until now.

Now they can shred the previously wasted broccoli stalks and sell it at a premium as “broccoli slaw.”

That, my friends, is innovation.

So I go out to light the grill for lunch (which I can do as I work from home), and I see a yellow line drawn on the rear wheel of the truck that we park outside:

I had driven it the night before, and my first thought was whether I had hit a curb and not known it. But I dismissed the thought because the mark would have been circular, not a straight line.

I thought perhaps one of my boys had drawn a chalk line on it for reasons of his own, but I didn’t recollect the boys playing outside the day before or that morning, and I hadn’t seen chalk where they could get to it.

Then my mind went to creepy thriller territory: What if someone else drew a line on my tire for some weird purpose?

Then I saw yellow scattered on the ground near the grill itself:

Pollen.

It had rained overnight, most of the night, I guess; I slept through much of it. But it rained enough for water to stand at the boundary of the asphalt and concrete in our driveway, as it often does, and the pollen floating atop the water affixed to the tire. By the time I went out to grill, though, the water had disappeared, leaving only the line of pollen. And a little mystery for me to solve amid my preparations for grilling a couple of steaks for lunch.

But maybe that’s what the creepy chalk wheel marker wants me to think to lull me into a false sense of security.

but those Spider-Man 3 sheets that you’re about to outgrow are from two whole cinematic reboots of the franchise ago.

The last reboot didn’t even make it to a third movie (and, to be honest, I skipped that whole reboot).

Time will tell if the current Spider-Man makes it to a third film before Marvel alienates its core fandom completely or the kid who plays Spider-Man grows up.

So I spent most of yesterday in a serious mood given the events which transpired. So I thought I would give myself the chance at an easy win by examining and correcting a problem our vacuum had.

You see, on Sunday evening, it was time to do a haphazard and quick job on the weekend chores for my boys. The chores include vacuuming the common areas of the main level of the house. The youngest claimed to have done it, but when I came up, the floor contained visible bits of thread, paper, and the litter bits that vacuuming should clear. I told him to do it again, and he claimed to have done it again, with the same results. So I tried calmly to show the by-now angry, nay, GRIEVIOUSLY OFFENDED young man the proper way to vacuum, and as I started, I noticed something was resisting.

I turned it over, and the roller was not rolling. Apparently, on a previous vacuuming, somechild had vacuumed a cat toy. Which is a 45″ shoe lace tied to a ring of pom-poms and bells. Which must have immediately stopped the roller, but not the vacuuming. It might have been this way for weeks.

So I removed the obstruction and turned the vacuum on, but the roller did not spin, so I brought it down into my office for later investigation.

Which was late Monday afternoon, after, as I mentioned, my car broke down on the way to the DMV.

I thought I might have to open the roller housing and adjust the belt or something. So I plugged it in and turned it over and before looking for the means to open it, I thought I’d try it again, so I hit the power button.

And got a face full of dust and cat hair and the roller began to spin.

So it capped off the Monday of all Mondays, but it made me laugh, so it was worth it.

Also, I continue to look like a Real Man as I fixed another appliance.

So my driver’s license expired on my birthday, and I forgot about it because they sent me a reminder card in early December, which is far ahead of my birthday, and I treated it like a license plate renewal: You don’t want to do it months in advance, otherwise you’re early and losing some value.

But I remembered last Wednesday when I saw a headline in the newspaper that said REAL-ID compliant licenses would become available today, Monday, March 25. So I thought I would wait until today to renew.

So I got my beautiful wife to act as my chaffeur for the weekend, and this morning, I piled the boys into my the truck I just bought to take them to school and to stop by the license office on the way home.

As we started up a hill about a half mile from our place on the two-lane farm road, the truck lost power and would no longer go forward. I tried to power it up to the next turn-off, but no dice. The road does not have a shoulder; it has ditches. So I called my beautiful wife to bring the old, high-mileage SUV to take the boys to school, and I waited for a tow truck. While blocking traffic. Even with my flashers on, cars pulled up behind me and honked until I opened the hood in the universal symbol of This truck is going nowhere under its own power. A couple of people offered to help, which was nice. A young lady offered to help me push the full size SUV up the hill to the next turn off, which I thought was overly optimistic.

The guy at the garage was rubbing his hands together on the inside when he said it sounded like the timing belt. Which can cause significant damage to the engine if it breaks while the vehicle is running. Frankly, I’m hoping for less than half the cost of the vehicle at this point. It’s under warranty, hopefully, but we’ll see.

So eventually, I made it to the license office and found a great line of people getting their new REAL-ID licenses. With only one person processing driver’s license renewals. Which are taking about ten minutes per person because of the additional paperwork required. Which I did not bring because my instructions card from December covered a regular driver’s license, not the REAL-ID compliant one which, of course, requires more than the old driver’s license and a postcard.

So my truck broke down on the way to the DMV, where I couldn’t get the license I’d hoped for when I finally got there.

But everyone’s been very nice, and when they’ve said, “How are you?” I’ve responded “So far, so good,” and when they’ve said “Have a nice day,” I’ve said, “Thanks.”

A couple of days ago, my beautiful wife shared this meme on Facebook:

Oh, how I chuckled.

But this morning, as I was downloading a new text editor, I confronted:

Now you, gentle reader, can chuckle as the joke is on me.

This variety of Tide, unlike the other leading brands, leaves your freshly laundered clothing smelling like fresh linen.

Which makes me wonder what the other brands or, more importantly, the other varieties of Tide leave your clothing smelling like.

(I know, I know: “Clean Linen” is a particular scent that gets added to a number of cleaning products. We have a number of Glade Plugin things that carry the same scent. It’s kind of like the “Grape” flavor in candies and Kool Aid: a common artifice. And you’re saying: How many colons can he use in one parenthetical? Just this many: four.)

The Springfield Business Journal has selected the 2019 40 Under 40 list, and I didn’t make it, again.

Of course, I’m no longer eligible, and these magazines don’t tend to create 30 Who Try To Act Like They’re Under 30 lists.

That said, I’m pleased to be on the 7.5 Billion Not Under Six Feet list yet again today. So I’ll start there for the day.

Spring, or as it is known at Nogglestead, “Repair the Gates Season.”

This year, I didn’t have any trouble with the hinges (so far) since I attached them with carriage bolts driven completely through the posts/gates and secured on the other side with a washer and a bolt.

But this year, the wind tore the edge picket off of one of my gates, and that’s where the hardware to close the gate attached, so it has been blowing in the strong winds of early march. So I replaced the picket today, eventually.

Because Spring is also known as “This Drill’s Battery Ran Out Of Charge/Where Is The Other Battery?” season.

I believe the Germans have a word for it, but it’s not as melliflous as the original Ojibwe.

Captain Capitalism tells us how he really thinks:

I don’t think the English language is robust or thorough enough for me to convey my hatred, despisement, and loathing of English majors. They are first and foremost lazy people who decide to major in a language they’re already fluent in by the age of 4. They are intellectual inferiors who think studying a subject to the point of atomic levels of anal retentive detail is a legitimate endeavor. And worst of all they are fascist tyrants who lord their technical, but impractical, knowledge of petty rules and laws of a “language” over the rest of us who use the language to live our lives, not make it our lives, because we have lives…unlike English majors.

I cannot overstate how inferior English majors are or how much I hate their loathesome and laughably inferior selves.

Ha, ha, your humble host laughs, that’s not me! I also was a philosophy major!

Is that hysterical laughter barely keeping me from tears?

You, gentle reader, must tease that out of the text and write a three page paper defending your conclusion.

The father glanced out the front window and looked again.
“What!” he cried.
He threw open the front door and shouted, “No! No power tools!” at his ten-year-old son who was lying in the yard using an electric hedge trimmer on the brown grass.

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