Author: Brian J. Noggle

As you might know, gentle reader, when I first moved to Nogglestead, I began planting an orchard of pear, apple, peach, and cherry trees.

It has not been particularly rewarding. To make a short story long, deer ringed the apple trees the first year–they stripped bark all the way around the trees, which killed them. I replaced them and resuscitated one, only to discover the signs of life it showed came from the crab apple root stock and not the grafted eating apple part of the tree. Then, we’ve had cold winters, late freezes, droughts, and Japanese beetles so that I did not get any yield even almost a decade later.

Until this year, when we have had a moderate summer and a wet spring which apparently kept the beetles at bay. The harvest of the peach trees in the front was small peaches and just enough for me to snack on them when I went out to the mailbox and back. Growing fruit here is a little like Edge of Tomorrow; every year, we get a little closer, but something gets the harvest.

Like a derecho wind this spring that blew through the Nogglestead side yard, where it knocked over a couple of apple trees and sent a large tree crashing against one of our side light posts, destroying it.

The apple trees were pushed over, but they were still alive. Until the deer came along and could suddenly reach all the leaves.

But I see that, in addition to the remaining a couple of small apples (hopefully, not crab apples, it has sprouted some new leaves.

I’m not sure what I am to do with the tree and its smaller fallen brother closer to the woods. Perhaps in the spring, I will hook it up to my truck or my tractor (lawn mower, but I don’t feel as rural if I admit that) to try to stand it up or continue to let it grow crooked.

Probably the latter, as I am lazy.

As my beautiful wife and possibly anyone who has been following my Good Album Hunting posts could have guessed, two tiers of record shelving, with roughly eleven linear feet of record storage, cannot contain all the records at Nogglestead.

So I quickly assembled a third tier, and as I was priming it yesterday, I noticed something.

When painting something, I always go from left to right or counterclockwise around the item.

I credit this to being old enough to remember a typewriter, and I’m just doing what the typewriter does with paint.

I dunno, maybe it’s more because that’s my dominant hand. But I like the typewriter analogy better.

Also, please note that I am not sure if roughly sixteen feet of shelving will be enough.

Thank you, that is all.

As I have mentioned a time or two, I scan the local society pages because, as Springfield is a smaller city, I can often see people I know or know of on the pages of 417 or in the photo galleries of the News-Leader.

And, to be honest, I started wondering when we would appear in those very galleries.

I mean, we have attended charitable functions from time to time, although we haven’t been back to a mega-ticket capital G-gala since the Springfield Symphony Guild Debacle of 2015. Even when I see the society photographer, he refuses to make eye contact. Still, I expected at some point I would be able to put down the beer and smile with my arm candy.

My beautiful wife has begun attending local business functions as she is a local business owner with a viable, proven software product on the market, and she is the first to the galleries with an image in the Biz 417 gallery for the Springfield Chamber of Commerce Luncheon 2019:

Compare that photo to this one from a recent book signing:

Of course, when you get to a certain age, sixteen years ago qualifies as recent.

But it proves that she is an ageless beauty.

Best friends are both hospitalised after challenging each other to do 1,000 SQUATS in one go during a video call:

Two best friends in China have both been hospitalised after competing with each other to do 1,000 squats in one go.

Tang, 19, said she and her friend carried out the challenge earlier this month during a video call which lasted for about three hours.

* * * *

Tang went to a local hospital accompanied by her boyfriend. She claimed that her legs ached so much she could not even be carried by her boyfriend.

At last, she had to move slowly on her own to the hospital and was found to have a serious syndrome caused by muscle injury, known as rhabdomyolysis.

Rhabdomyolysis is a potentially fatal condition that occurs when muscles are injured and they release their contents, including a muscle enzyme, into the bloodstream.

That sounds dangerous. I’d better sit down.

Although trying to do 1000 squats sounds like something I would try. Fortunately, though, I tend to forget to do squats at all unless I’m at the gym or the dojo.

I changed the linens in the boys’ bedroom this week, and it was the last time I would make up my oldest child’s bed with sheets with cartoon characters on them.

They’ve had Spider-Man, Batman, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mario, or Star Wars sheets on their beds ever since they had big boy beds. Oh, and how delighted they were when I would spend twenty bucks at the Walmart to pick up a new set and they would come home to vivid new colors and heroes. They were easy to delight when they were young.

They started out in separate bedrooms with their cribs and then their big boy beds–a set of bunk beds separated by a wall. A couple years ago, we moved them into a room together and activated the bunk bed feature of the bunk beds. We made the corner bedroom into a guest bedroom and painted it a pleasant orange, but we never got around to decorating it with wall hangings. It idled, as we haven’t had many guests to Nogglestead in recent years. Mostly, the boys used it as a playroom as their extensive Lego holdings resided in that closet.

This summer, though, as my wife thought she would spend a lot of time in the room after recent surgery, she ordered some art from a catalog, and I put them up. She didn’t end up spending much time in that room after all, but we’ve decided to again separate the boys into separate bedrooms, and the oldest will get the former guest bedroom and its full-sized bed.

So he’ll go to bed with adult sheets now and forever more (unless he’s a modern young man who might end up with cartoon sheets in adulthood). I guess it’s fitting; at 13, he has moved into adult-sized clothes that his mother often puts into my drawers.

But it puts one in a melancholy mood to start the morning. My children are growing up, and most of our lives will be spent apart.

A melancholy solved by actual exposure to those siblings who begin squabbling the minute they awaken (hence the separate bedrooms soon). Suddenly, I’m Can I send them to military school starting today?

Brian J., did you live at the head or the mouth of the holler?

To be honest, when I lived down the gravel road in the holler made by Heads Creek (the house actually had some creekfront exposure, but in the back), I lived midway down the holler. Maybe somewhere in the nasal passages of the holler, or somewhere in the digestive tract.

But this description of the neighborhood is accurate:

Some hollers are more populated than others and it isn’t uncommon for as many as 300 people to live up a single holler, if “the bottoms” are land and wide enough for enough mobile homes, three story “fancy houses” and simple cinderblock homes — a fascinating patchwork I’ve seen only in the Appalachian Mountains where the haves and have nots coexist as equal neighbors.

Although I don’t know if the head and mouth really apply, as Heads Creek moved through various hills and hollows. I tend to think of the “mouth” of the hollow as where Heads Creek Road meets Highway MM, as this was our access route to the rest of the world, and Heads Creek Road followed the creek south from there. My holler was not the one with the fancy homes in it.

And I wasn’t born there; I moved in in high school and lived there for two and a half years, visited twice a year for four years, and then lived there again for a year or so. So I wasn’t related to anyone then (although my frisky younger brother might mean I have relations there now), and I didn’t get many “firsts” there aside from my first time having a party line or the first time living where one could dust the trees.

(Link via the Ace of Spades HQ ONT.)