To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Because Patrice Lewis said so.
I was catching up on Rural Revolution, and Mrs. Lewis posted about shedding snakes at her homestead (Spring Snakes and Yep, Shedding).
And minutes later, I stepped into my driveway and found a snakeskin of our own.
As I’m old school and crawl around in my garden to pull weeds, you’d better believe I’m talking to myself to make sure they hear me coming.
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So I still listen to WSIE from time to time, and Jason Church has mentioned that Keiko Matsui, the jazz fusion keyboardist, is coming to St. Louis in October. I’ve been thinking about picking up tickets even though it’s a weeknight show. However, my beautiful wife has picked up a contract chock full of calls during the workdays, so it might be hard for her to do it. So maybe I take one of my boys or go it alone. I mean, I have nine of her albums which puts her on par with Billy Joel, Pink Floyd, Herb Alpert, and Iron Maiden (if you count the Iron Maiden bonus disc).
But, jeez Louise, look at the ticket sales so far:
They are not exactly sold out yet.
I don’t know what’s wrong with the people of St. Louis. Too many good concerts to choose from. I mean, at the City Winery St. Louis itself, they have Michael Lington and Paul Taylor, Acoustic Alchemy, Eryka Badu, Spyro Gyra, Bebel Gilberto, Esperanza Spalding, Melissa Manchester, Janet Evra, and so on. Plus Jim Manley every week free. If I lived in St. Louis…..
I would probably not make it to as many things as I think I would. After all, I am not exactly tearing it up in Springfield even after seeing Jim Manley and vowing to change, much like seeing vowing to change in 2019.
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I claimed this book when we culled the bookshelves in my youngest’s bedroom in January. I actually thought I was reclaiming the book because it looks like the kind of thing I would have bought and reported on, only to have my young boys poach the book from my shelves and put it into their rooms. But, maybe not: I don’t see a mention of the book in either a Good Book Hunting post or a previous book report, so maybe it was one of the things we picked up for them at ABC Books when I dragged them up there before they got phones. Well, it’s mine now.
So: This is an official ICanHasCheezburger.com book. You know, I first mentioned that site on this blog in May 2007, so not quite twenty years ago. Clearly, I was or am the target market for the content: Pictures of cats with captions. Although this book is about kittens specifically.
Okay, amusing. I have to admit that I’ve not hit that Web site in a long time, even though in 2007, the olden days, I hit it several times a week. Maybe the modern stream of memes on social media and in meme posts on blogs have taken their place.
But this cute little book was a quick browse, and as I said, amusing. And the authors/proprietors have had better luck than I have trying to capitalize on kittens and cats (of Nogglestead), which include a soon-to-be defunct line of t-shirts at NicoSez.com (ah, gentle reader–am I giving up by planning to not renew for a third year of Web hosting and expensively provided SSL management? Yes, yes I am; although my intentions and my actions often do not coincide) and two apps (Nico’s Kitty Translator and Feline Fly Assassin, both featuring my cats). So they’ve got that going for them, which is nice.
And I have 39 books read this year. 100 is within reach!
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Welp, in researching this post, I discovered a similar sentiment in 2024 (It Almost Feels Like I’m Giving Up). But I have done it. Well, that’s a pronoun without a proper antecedent.
So: The Lutherans for Life annual yard sale started accepting donations yesterday, and we took 17 boxes (and one piece of furniture) in two trips up to the Trinity Lutheran Church gym. We were not the only ones to deliver on day 1: On both of our trips, we encountered several other trucks with various (smaller) loads, although there was a U-Haul rented for such an occasion that we maneuvered around on our second visit.
17 boxes. Enough for a yard sale of our own, actually, which is atypical; usually, when taking things for the Redeemer Youth Garage sale (discontinued several years ago) or the Lutherans for Life sale, we have a couple of boxes. This stack comes from a couple of sources:
Ah, gentle reader: That is what feels like giving up (as I mentioned in 2024 and will recount again). I recycled a bunch of glass and bottles back in 2024, and I did not have only one bin to go through in 2024.
About a decade or fifteen years ago, I got the notion to drill holes into plates to insert clock movements into them. I did it with a couple of kid’s plates and trays and one or more ceramic plates.
So I bought a lot of plates and trays at garage sales (and a couple of hubcaps) and made clocks out of a few of them…. But, as with many of the things I was making, I came to a ceiling of sorts: I have a short circle of people to whom I give (gave) gifts, and I really didn’t have the confidence to make an Etsy shop or rent a craft or antique mall booth. So, I shifted to another hobby or craft so to give my Christmas gift recipients some variety. And I boxed a couple of things to spring on church’s silent auctions, although we don’t tend to have those any more, either.
I also mentioned (8 years ago) etching and painting wine bottles. Well, I also accrued many clear vases, wine glasses, and other clear glass to work on. And…. Well, I donated them to the Lutherans for Life yard sale. After a decade or so in the garage, they were covered with dust and cobwebs. And I did not take time to clean them.
I had gathered a lot of frames for various things. I had made pressed flowers from the gardens of Nogglestead with a mirror background (cut down from a mirrored tile or small mirror), so I bought a bunch of frames, expecting I would make many other things like the gift I gave to Gloria after she came to visit–and which she sent back shortly before she died. But I didn’t, and those microwave-pressed flowers have faded on the parlor wall since. But I had boxes of frames and shadowboxes and small mirrors.
Ah, gentle reader, as I rummaged through the boxes, pre-rummaging for the rummage salers to come, I wanted to keep all of it.
But I didn’t. I packed several boxes of frames and of glassware for the garage sale. A box or two of oddball plates I’d accumulated, some with thrift store prices written on them or garage sale stickers.
I did keep the wood, the plaques, and the various articles I bought for woodburning. I saved the mirrors because I might want to put them in technological devices in the future. And I saved some frames because I might use them (and because I would have had to move the electric smoker to get to bottom shelf, and I didn’t have time for that yesterday).
Who knows? Perhaps the room in the garage will give me time to work on projects. I think my beautiful wife would like to park a second vehicle in our three car (three cars in the middle 1980s, so three small cars) garage.
But, yet. So much reified potential lost. Of course, the decade and a half where these things went unused was also lost. And continue to be lost.
Until I go back later this month and buy it all back.
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Ah, gentle reader: As I mentioned when I bought this book in 2020 with a gift card, I had read about Dunbar somewhere and had bookmarked his Wikipedia entry for later use when writing an essay or something. Back when I thought I was an essayist. I guess it’s only been 20 years since I had a piece in History magazine and a couple in Writer’s Journal. Could I have bookmarked it that long ago? Ah, gentle reader, I have exported my then-Firefox and now-Brave bookmarks every time I’ve upgraded computers, so…. Maybe.
As I might have mentioned, I have returned to reading in my bedroom immediately before bed–some time ago, I had a full-sized lamp beside the bed, and I read in bed for a while before sleeping, but we moved a small chair into the bedroom because my beautiful wife has always favored the idea of a “reading nook.” She doesn’t read there frequently, but I’ve taken to having a stack of literary magazines handy there to transition to bedtime. I’ve also read poetry books there, including the first part of The Complete Works of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Odes of Pindar, and some Salesian Missions things. For the last couple of months, I’ve had this 479 page long collection.
I don’t remember where I first came across his name, but I’ll definitely say that (in my opinion), Paul Laurence Dunbar was one of America’s best poets, certainly of his time (the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th). Much of his poem has rhythm and rhyme and is eminently approachable and readable and has actual substance to it, sometimes unexpected but plausible takes and metaphors. But.
But, and this is something that can be used to ding and to dismiss James Whitcomb Riley (Dunbar’s contemporary). Dunbar wrote a lot in the vernacular, and in his case, as his speakers were former slaves and black, the vernacular probably triggers modern readers. But even within the poems in the vernacular have depth and poetic sensitivity. Another thing that separates him from modern poetry, well, a couple of things: One, his poems not in the vernacular are rather formal in structure, so they’re not authentic enough. And the other thing modern professionals might think is a sin is that some of the former slaves who miss their lives as slaves. You know, when they were freed, they lost a lot of social structure, comraderie, and suddenly had to live a completely different life. Which led to some complexity in human emotion, ainna? But that would be doubleplusungood thought expressed in the 21st century. I guess I should add here because it is the 21st century that I am not advocating slavery, but I can imagine some counterintuitive and conflicted emotions on the part of the freed slaves.
So, yeah, I liked this book. Over the months of working through it, I flagged a number of poems. I’m not going to recount them here for you, gentle reader–I’m thinking I might at a later time pull this book from the shelf and re-read what I have flagged. I also bought a later edition of his first work, Lyrics of Lowly Life in 2023. When I bought it, I pointed out to the volunteer counting my books that he was an important black poet and one of the first to achieve fame from it, and she thought it was great that I knew it. I think it a failure of our collective society that nobody else does.
Dunbar died at 33; how unfortunate, but like Keats, he burned brightly. And wrote more poetry by that age than I can have been arsed to write with a couple of extra decades. But I’m working on it.
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Okay, not exactly true, but we did have a church potluck yesterday, and a couple-three weeks ago, I thought I should learn to make deviled eggs because they’re beloved at these things, second perhaps only to the triune God celebrated on Trinity Sunday as it happened to be. I mean, you can usually count on three or four people making deviled eggs, and if you get there two minutes after the pastor says the blessing, you ain’t getting any.
Since I happen to like the one or two deviled eggs available when I get there in time and when I push Gladys and Milt, those codgers, out of the way, I thought (angels singing “aw-aw” and a light shining down from heaven or there abouts, or perhaps just the sun coming out after a week of rain) that maybe I could bring in some deviled eggs. After all, I’m comfortable with baking them to make hard-cooked eggs in quantity. I did just subsist on (it seemed) hard-cooked eggs for the Whole30 diet in January. So that’s not the thing.
So, a couple-three weeks ago, I hard-cooked two dozen eggs (one Sam’s Club pack), and I tried the recipe in the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook (sized for 6 eggs). And I subbed in three kinds of mustard: Yellow, Dijon, and Horseradish. For the final set, I used the alternate Italian-style recipe with Italian creamy dressing and Parmesan cheese. And I labeled them and put them in the refrigerator, only to re-discover that my boys, raised Lutheran, don’t like deviled eggs. So I went through them and decided that I liked the Italian recipe ones best.
BUT: I took ill about then. I thought, “Oh, no, I bollixed the eggs.” I feared not only for my futures at potlucks but for my upcoming vacation. But! My beautiful wife also had a tetch about the same time, and she is the remainder of the household who does not like eggs.
SO: Alright, vacation saved, but this week approached, and I had some older (but good, I hoped) eggs in the refrigerator. So I baked them on Friday, thinking of deviling them to try out recipes. But, day-um, the most tedious part of making deviled eggs is peeling the eggs. I baked them, and then I spent a long time taking (most of) the shells off, and…. Well, I was not in the mood to devil them any longer. So, as in the Whole30 period of my life, I set them aside to eat them for meals and snacks, and….
Well, nobody brought deviled eggs today. I brought a double helping of pasta salad and a chocolate pudding pie, preparation of which was easier given the Sunday choreography of picking up my mother-in-law for service, accommodating my wife who had to speak at a church business meeting after service, picking her up after her speaking, and getting things prepared just so for church, I abandoned the plan of deviled eggs. I did, however, have one of the peeled hard-cooked eggs available for this photo. And then I ate the photo subject. Because I am not wasteful.
Given that nobody brought deviled eggs (or potato salad, jeez Louise, these modern Lutherans and their pizza provided and store-boughten coleslaw), I’m thinking of working to perfect and to get comfortable with my Italian deviled egg recipe.
But not in the near term. I feel like I’m living the slow-motion equivalent of the Cool Hand Luke bet scene (I haven’t seen the film, but perhaps I should look for it) where he has to eat 50 hardboiled eggs at once. Ask me now, and I’m not eager to eat another even though I have six remaining in the refrigerator.
Maybe if I did it in moderation, but: I have a lot of Lutherans to feed. Also, let’s hope for a good potato crop, because apparently I am also in charge of the potato salad now.
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