Month: June 2026

Ah, spring. The time of the year when the weather alert radio goes off, or not, when severe weather threatens.

This month, we’ve had several rounds of severe weather in southwest Missouri, which is normal. Last year, severe storms knocked down a hella lotta trees up north in one storm and then down south here in another, leaving broad swaths of the region without power for days or weeks (our turn came at the end of June). This year, we had a round of heavy hail which devastated the north part of the city, and recently we had a round of storms that included an EF0 tornado that touched down briefly on the eastern end of Battlefield, the town that begins across the farm road from me.

On that occasion, my weather radio did not alert, but my beautiful wife was upstairs and heard the sirens instead. Nothing but heavy rain here, enough to keep the swimming pool kinda full (the fact that we need heavy rain to keep the pool full is a worry for another day).

Then, on Saturday night, the weather radio went off just before midnight. In the dark, I button-mashed the top of the radio, hoping to get the voice messages, but I didn’t hit the right combo in the darkness and opted for rousing my family and getting them downstairs where I could check the Internet, maybe.

But the Internet indicated the tornado warning was for Barry County, south of here. I went back upstairs to check the radio, and I had button-mashed the text of the alert away so all I could see was the red light and the incorrect date and time. A red light could be anything–flood warning, severe thunderstorm warning, nuclear attack–I’ve squelched the klaxon for all of these, leaving only the tornado warning to alarum and awaken us. We remained downstairs for a while–everyone else ended up sleeping down there. When I came upstairs, the amber light was on, indicating a watch of some sort.

As I was getting to sleep, my phone blared:

Jiminy crickets! I de-bleared my eyes to read it, and it’s an IMMINENT THREAT ALERT that the James River was flooding and fast.

Ah, but gentle reader. I am not close to the James River, and this was not an immediate threat to me trying to sleep in my dry bed at 2:00 in the morning.

So the warnings for Nogglestead have been off-kilter this year. I’ll check the radio to see if it’s somehow gotten set so that we’re in Barry County or something. My wife wondered if it was because our Starlink internet jumps around IPs so that location detection picks us up elsewhere, but this is a radio, the old-timey device. So it’s either a bad setting in the radio or the trainees at the weather service are hitting the wrong buttons.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep watching the skies. Except at night, when most of our tornado warnings happen.

And note this is the only time I really miss “cutting the cord.” When we had tornado warnings in the past, we could go downstairs and flip on the television and watch the KY3 wall-to-wall coverage with immediate updates. I’ve got the weather app and the news apps on my phone, but they’re pretty useless in these instances–and they rely on the Internet, which gets hinky in storms because it’s trying to beam to the satellites through the clouds. Still, I don’t miss it a couple thousand dollars a year’s worth.

Ah, Rick and Friar, I don’t mean to demean your patronage here, but my primary “readers” (that is, data ingesters) continue to be clankers of one variety or another. Chinese LLMs consuming the blog hundreds of pages at a time or Facebook trying to “engage” me more.

Another data point for the hypothesis: yesterday, I post about a local Carnegie library. Today, Facebook shares a post about Carnegie branches all around the state:

Instead of showing me posts from, you know, people I’m connected to on Facebook. Because the machine is not making money showing me their posts.

When we first moved to southwest Missouri, the branch library in the next town over was in a storefront just over from the Walmart. They were building a new branch, and it opened not long after we settled. I took my young boys to several story time activities there, and it was our home branch for a couple of years before their schooling and other activities took us into Springfield every day. Fifteen years on, the library system decided the town needed a new branch, so they built a new one to replace the still newish (fifteen years old for a library? C’mon, man, like a church building, that’s a pup that has not yet developed character–not that either is built with character any more). Whilst it was being built, I applied for a part-time job as a shelver at that branch, thinking maybe librarian might make a good second career choice for me–probably not, given what modern librarianing is. I was actually called in for an interview, but I demurred–a friend’s daughter also applied for the position, and I didn’t want to take it from her.

So after the grand opening of the new building, my beautiful wife had an (overdue) book to return, so we stopped by the new building which features an auditorium, a computer lab, meeting rooms, and…. One room with books, a small set of shelves which looked like it had fewer books than the previous small branch had.

Last week, as part of the Summer Reading Program, one of the activities was to go to a different branch of the library. I don’t know whether to count the small town (but growing rapidly town, he added to keep the Chamber of Commerce people happy) or the Springfield-Greene County mothership branch as my home branch–I generally choose the mothership as my “home branch” when I fill out the Winter Reading Challenge forms, but over the last couple of years, I’ve only gone into the library to either pick up or return a reading challenge form.

Our travels took us through the middle part of the city (as we went to ABC Books and a street mural, another activity for the summer reading challenge), and we stopped by the Midtown Carnegie Branch. Ah, Carnegie. So you know what you’re in for: An older branch with character. We visited this branch in the summer of 2017, when the boys and I visited all the library branches as part of our own summer challenge (including far-flung branches in the northern part of the county in Ash Grove and Fair Grove, which is in a room at the fire station). This branch has also had an expansion, a modern graft onto the brick and mortar front of the building. When we entered from the rear, we had options to go up or to go down, and I said to the employee/volunteer (?) at the desk inside the door that I wanted to go up to the books, and I went up to find…. Again, fewer books than previously. I went to the philosophy section which was a single shelf, about 20 inches of books–in my previous visit, I picked up Daniel Klein’s Every Time I Find The Meaning Of Life, They Change It (which I just listened to as an audio book in December, so you might have recognized the title). The section was mostly pop-philosophy (not that the Klein was any different), but the total stacks, again, were, what, 12 or 20 sets of shelves? Not a hella lot for a middle-of-the-city branch, and not a lot of primary sources in the mix (I think I’ve written a screed on this before, but I couldn’t find it quickly).

Ah, general reader. I am not a library scientist, but my understanding of history is that, back in the olden days of centuries past, when books became more available, people put together private groups that would trade books amongst them, or private lending libraries made them available, or you could subscribe to lending libraries for cash, and public libraries were designed to democratize access to books for the public.

Ah, but nobody reads now–not many people–and libraries seem to have cast around for new missions to keep, you know, their employees employed. Which is now budget-intensive things like computer labs, maker spaces, and larger and larger meeting rooms and auditoriums (as well as training programs and, let’s be honest, a capex hit on providing me with mugs I rarely use). I should note here that the mothership branch has a decent set of stacks, but it, too, recently underwent an expansion. Not for more room for books, of course, but rather a larger auditorium for programs and, I suppose, to let.

Which is why I draw the comparison to convention centers, at least in terms of the need to refresh (technology, at least) every couple of years. To keep up with modern needs. Which, I reiterate, does not seem to be books.

Is the public library really, really necessary in the 21st century if it is not there to have stately buildings, safe spaces, and books?

You know, I am a fan of privately run community libraries who, run by volunteers and stocked by donations, made books available to the public. However, the ones that I have supported over the years have become public libraries–eager for the certainty of funding and access to, well, funding. I haven’t been to them lately, but I wonder if they have fewer books now that they’re public libraries? To be honest, I think that the Community Library in High Ridge, which I frequented when I was in high school, might have had stacks on par with the branches I visited this month.

So perhaps librarian is not the new career I am looking for. Maybe Library Board would be a better fit, where I could say, Are you serious? and No a lot. Which I’ve already trained for in a long career in software quality assurance.

Ah, gentle reader. Last September, in a haul of buck bundles of chapbooks and literary magazines, I got two copies of the Wingéd Lion, the literary magazine (at the time) from Missouri Southern State College (now MSSU) in Joplin.

The issues are dated Spring 1975 and Spring 1978. I would have expected the freshman and sophomores to be present in both, but we really only have a contribution from Sharon Rogers, a junior in 1975 and a senior in 1978 (a part-time student or a long-time student).

Oh, man, did they remind me of my high school literary magazine, Pen and Palette.

Both are landscape (11″ x 8½”) and are on heavy bond paper with heavy covers. The art styles match almost match–the 1970s ones are more in line with its times and the Pen and Palette art represented a lot of good art class projects. But I wondered if the style was shared with a lot of small college literary magazines–Mama Joy, the sponsor of the Northwest Writers club, would have been just about the age to have graduated college in the middle 1970s. After all, 1987, or first issue, was less than a decade after 1978. But, no. I checked the masthead to see if I knew any of the people in it, but also no, although one name, the woman who was both the junior and the senior, seemed familiar, but I couldn’t make a connection.

Ah, those literary journal days. I thought I could make it as a poet and a short story writer, maybe also a novelist, coming out of high school and going into college to write. Here are my contributions to Pen and Palette:

1987:
“A Model Murder”, a detective fiction short story.

1988:

• “Fall”, a poem
• “A Shocking Case of Murder”, another detective fiction short story. I had a bunch using the same characters with gimmick twists.

1989:

• “Shepherd: For Hire: The Sharp Kidnapping”, a satiric short story about a high school student who thinks he’s a detective. Not a true story, but in middle school, I wanted to start an in-school detective agency. I was serious.
• “Sonnet of Spring” which might have been my first sonnet, actually.
• “Tyrone Jackson: The Search for Maynerd”, a short story that a group of us wrote in Creative Writing class. It was a story in the round sort of thing, where each group wrote a bit and passed it to the next group. We inserted Tyrone Jackson into all of the stories. I wrote our original story as it should be told, and eventually I wrote a whole collection about this character. I have, of course, told this story before. In 2004. Which is closer to then than it is to now. Man, I wish I still had that binder.

1990:

• “Adventures and Exotic Places”, a short story with a real Walter Mitty vibe.
• “Stopping of a Poem by a Thought”, a satiric poem making light of a Robert Frost poem.
• “The Vigilante”, an unrelated crime short story.

I didn’t have anything in the 1991 or 1992 editions because I’d graduated by then–no three year gaps between my high school junior and senior years–but my brother was still in the writing group, and my sainted mother sponsored for two additional years.

My college, sorry, university, had a magazine which put out a literary “edition” which was a small separate digest in 1991 and 1992, but was rolled into the regular magazine as a supplement in the spring.

I had a poem in the 1991 edition (“a brash young man, ideas set…”) and a poem in the 1993 edition (“Listening to the Night”), but, boy, howdy, look at the table of contents in 1994:

Two of the three short stories (“An Aluminum Dream” and “Shepherd: At College” featuring the same character from the high school literary magazine). Six of the fifteen poems, including:

• “Chance Encounter”
• “Homecoming: A Collage”
• “View from a Railcar”
• “Upon the snowy pillow next to me…”
• “Falling Snow”
• “Third Floor Eyes”

Four sonnets, a long free verse narrative, and on general poem.

I did not win either of the cash prizes awarded–one for fiction and one for poetry–so maybe the lesson I should have taken from my experience is that it was easy to get published, but not so easy to get paid. Although I’m not finding it easy to get published these days in existing outlets that don’t have “Facebook,” “LinkedIn,” or “Musings from Brian J. Noggle” in the title.

Aside from that, though, the main thing (which will be far briefer in account than the lesser thing of Look at me! I coulda been somebody! is how we students were swinging for the fences. Trying different themes, trying different genres (well, everyone except me who stuck to detective fiction mostly), different rhyme schemes and forms for poems…. Reading college literary magazines these days don’t seem as freewheeling.

Or maybe I’ll change my assessment as I get into additional magazines in the stack upstairs–but most of them are college literary magazines where the contributions come from outside the student body (ahem–from people like me). So they might prove to be fairly homogenous and, well, common.

Maybe I should take up a new hobby of prowling for college literary magazine that might contain writers who went on to bigger things. Almost as interesting as collecting gentlemen’s magazines with Stephen King stories, but with a little less nudity. Which is its own reward even if the investment in obscurity does not pay out.

As you know, gentle reader, I have been doing the Springfield-Greene County Library’s Winter Reading Challenge for, what, six years now? Yes–2021 was the first year. Each summer, too, the library has a Summer Reading Challenge, but I’ve shied away from them because they weren’t a reading challenge–instead of reading five books in fifteen categories in two months (or in all fifteen categories, as I am a stretch goaler), you read five books in three months but do five activities as well. Kid-kinda activities, even in the adult program.

So I’ve avoided it. Except for this year.

My beautiful wife mentioned it in passing, and so I looked at the flyer for it.

Activities included going to a different branch of the library than you normally do, going to the First Friday Art Walk…. downtown, I think?, downloading the library app, attending a book discussion, going to the Missouri Institute of Natural Science, or doing you own activity (up to three out of five can be your write-ins).

I would have dismissed it again, but….

Well, a couple of things. First of all, my youngest is also at a loose end. He graduated from high school, separated from his high school job, has been slow to hunt for another job, and is prone to spending all day playing Minecraft unless someone shanghais him into leaving the house. I had just done the thing last week, and we went to the co-op to pay our electricity bill, when (second of all) we passed right by the Missouri Institute of Natural Science.

It’s a small museum of paleontology and geology; when a road crew blasted its way into a cave (in the 21st century), they found fossils and whatnot and decided to preserve them. When I say it’s a small museum, I mean two rooms, essentially. When the boys were young, one summer I had free reign (I mean reign)–I was between contracts, and they were out of school for the summer in a time before I was not between contracts, and they spent their summers in daycare “summer camps” at various churches and whatnot. So that summer (after they spent a month in their own school’s “summer camp”), I took them to a lot of local attractions, museums, hiking trails, and bowling–lots and lots of bowling. When we visited then, MINS was only a single room. Ah, but where has the time gone?

I dragged the boy man to MINS, briefly–our visit was but thirty minutes, maybe, and part of that was me swapping old man stories with the old man volunteer who lives nearby. I have, what, three pictures from the trip? Different from the first one, but our digital photography strategy has changed. When the boys were young, we copied all the photos from the digital camera and later from the iPhone. But now, we take a couple of photos when we remember to, and we save only the best to conserve space on gigabytes and terabytes of hard drives. Mostly to save space on the backup devices, which are likely a decade or so behind current storage, although with the trends in current prices, soon they’ll be parate again.

So I started my Microsoft Publisher document for tracking books and activities (Publisher will live long enough for me to finish this reading challenge, as Microsoft is sunsetting it and making it impossible for me to access 30 years of .pub documents–ask me how I feel–but you can probably guess). And then…

The next week, we took a trip to ABC Books (not that one, but the one we mentioned in it. Since we were going to that corner of the city, we could hit another branch of the library–we chose the Midtown Carnegie Branch (can you tell where it came from?). I checked out a book, to be reported on when I finish it. After that, we went to the baseball stadium in town, formerly known as Hammons Field but now called Route 66 Stadium (or is it?) to get a photo by the public mural on it. Bang! We were already three activities in!

Over the weekend, we went to the Pickwick Street Fair. Well, briefly. I finally got to see Kristi Merideth, whose CD I got in in 2016 and whom I mentioned in 2018 had a child in school with mine. I say briefly because the crowds agitated the oldest, and neither of them was impressed that their elementary and middle school colleague was on the stage. Also, they had no seating within the event boundaries to enjoy the music–although we could have gone to the coffee shop next door and sat on the patio, but they were ready to go.

That’s four already, and it’s only the second week of June. Strangely, I am further behind on the books than the activities. And we will finish the activities for the summer reading program this week, probably. Which means I will turn in my “game board” next week and get the unnamed prize.

I have encouraged my youngest to participate as well since I’m dragging him along to the events. And, you know what? I’ll probably find activities for the both of us to tear us away from the computer on the days until he gets a job, I get a job, or he starts his in-person college classes. It will be good for both of us. Mostly me, as it also allows me to return to a summer with two knockabout boys that we spent doing things together.

Now, what should we do today? Plant a summer flower (or flowers) together to complete the reading challenge? Go bowling and to the nature center, just like the old days but just the two of us? The summer reading challenge has suddenly prompted us to the possibilities.

I am not the Imelda Marcos of hats, gentle reader, but I have accumulated some in my time, and, at Nogglestead, they (and those owned by the other members of the family) tend to gather in two places.

One, the top of the video game in my office, is where my hats end up.

This is where I put hats which I do not wear often. A lot of times, these include hats I’ve bought on vacations to cover my balding head.

The collection includes:

• A cheesehead.
• The boonie hat I just bought in Florida last month.
• The paper hat I bought in Arkansas in 2023.
• Three (3) grey fedoras that I have bought at garage sales over the years before re-learning that grey is not really my color. One of these might actually be the first fedora I got while in college, which I wore when writing my first novel.
• Two (2) black fedoras that were my daily wear fedoras before they wore out–one has a hole at the top of the crown at the front, where you grab a hat to take it off. The other does not seem to hold its shape.
• Another straw hat with the Island Beach brand name on it, which probably indicates I also bought it in Florida.
• A little Tyrolean (Alpine) hat which I bought at Friestatt’s Ernte Fest a couple years ago (maybe 4 now?).
• Three (3) NRA caps which I got for renewing my memberships over the years.
• A John Deere cap which probably came with my lawnmower–I cannot imagine actually buying one. Oh, I see the back says Owner’s Edition, so, yeah, I got that sixteen years ago when I bought the
• A Canada cap which my mother-in-law bought for me as a souvenir on one of her driving trips probably fifteen years ago. Or twenty. They’re about the same when you reach a certain age.
• A youth-sized Green Bay Packers cap.
• A white Springfield Cardinals cap which I bought as part of a bundle at a silent auction or at the ballpark.
• A Springfield Cardinals 2012 champs cap (ibid.).
• A Milwaukee Brewers cap which I bought on one of the trips to the Dells–probably 2017. It was the go-to cap for a while, but it has gotten stained, so it’s in the… collection, I guess?
• A St. Louis Blues hat which I bought back when we were DINKs who went to a lot of Blues games.
• A Missouri State ball cap which I bought to wear to…. The one football game we went to a decade or so back? Or one of the two Ice Bears games we went to over the years (and widely spaced, which is unfortunate since the tickets are inexpensive).
• A SparkCon hat I got as swag at the Walmart Cybersecurity Conference the first time I went. Pretty sure it was not this year.
• The Confederate hat I got after my father died.

Jeez, Louise, that’s 24 hats. More than I expected when I started writing this post. They were not only atop the game but behind it, as the top of the video game was a frequent destination for the kittens (and the cats still hop up there from time to time). The hats need blocking, and they’re all covered with dust and cat hair. To be honest, if I’d written this post last week, many of them would have ended up in the Lutherans for Life rummage sale. Like the probably youth-sized bucket hat I’d hoped to take to Florida (but it was youth-sized, probably not shrunken via washing as I said earlier).

Atop the refrigerator, hats also accumulate.

This is where I put the hats I wear regularly, including:

• My current black fedora.
• The current paper hat, if any–currently, it’s the ladies resort hat I bought last month in Florida.
• The Big Cedar Lodge cap I bought at our aborted vacation last year where it kept the rain off more than the sun.

The rest of the family keeps their caps up there as well. These include:

• A Missouri State Pride Band cap that my beautiful wife got at one of their reunions.
• A Dennis Hanks Chevrolet hat. That was my mother-in-law’s car dealer. Not sure if it came with the Chevy when she downsized or if she gave it to one of the boys at some time or another.
• Two (2) tech company swag hats from conferences.
• Two (2) tech company swag hats from my oldest son’s current employer, brought back from his time behind the booth in Florida last month.
• A SparkCon cap with less cat fur on it than mine.
• A tech company swag cap which is for my wife’s company. Not sure how many of those she got or if it was a free sample when she ordered other swag.

Ah, gentle reader. As with book accumulation points, sometimes hat accumulation points get decommissioned. Not depicted in this post: The pile of hats which had been in the garage.

For a long time, I had a pile of hats on the little desk in the garage which included:

• The hat I wore to the range in 2008–what was that company’s name? Something-care–I know TimBob, Jack Straw’s friend and who visited this blog in those early days, where “early” means five years into it.
• A Netscape hat whose logo was off-center.
• The cap I got when visiting the bay area and which served as my painting cap for a multi-year turn around the fence.
• A Queen City Roofing Materials cap which I bought when we first moved here. I guess I wanted to be more locally authentic or something.
• Several (?) other straw or brush hats that I’d bought on various vacations and intended for gardening use.
• A Dogwood Canyon cap bought on one of our trips to Big Cedar or Branson where we went further south for an expensive walk.

And probably a couple of others I forget.

As part of the multi-year garage cleaning project, I gathered them and boxed them for a donation–and they remained in a box or two awaiting an opportunity to donate them (which was this Monday, as I mentioned). I did wear some of the straw hats while gardening from time-to-time, but got into the habit of just putting on my most-recently-too-stained-for-going-out cap since the noise-canceling-but-music-blasting headset can fit over a ball cap but not a fully brimmed hat. My current cap is my previous Big Cedar Lodge cap. The garage might also have another cap stashed somewhere for the other lawnmower riders to use, but most of those aforementioned caps are in the Trinity Lutheran gym (or are in a dumpster nearby).

My goodness, that is a lot of hats. And an awful lot of words about the hats. But most of them are personal relics now, pointers to past events to cue my memories.